How intelligible are Turkish and Azeri? I know they are close enough, but I wonder if it similar to Scottish English vs. American English or farther, more like Spanish vs. Portuguese?
Alvaro@social.graves.cl to 
How intelligible are Turkish and Azeri? I know they are close enough, but I wonder if it similar to Scottish English vs. American English or farther, more like Spanish vs. Portuguese?
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It is like British and American English.
I can understand 80-90% of Azeri from either directly from words or context of the sentence. Azeri sounds more accented too.
I really don’t know the Scottish English so I’m not sure if its better fit.
If you think American v. British are at 80-90%, Scottish is around 30% and that's being generous 🙂
I learned English from mostly American sources and I can barely understand Brit English :) It’s not just words, the accent makes it harder too. I guess I would never understand Scottish one then.
The Turkish/Azeri situation is close to this, at least for me.
For a native speaker British and American English are probably at least 99% intelligible for the main dialects, though there are some regional accents that are less. Scottish is usually mostly intelligible but I’ve heard some Irish ones where I can only catch a few words here and there.
There's I think a Tom Scott video where he interviewed someone with just the absolute thickest accent in a little Irish village, and he needed a translator from the village to mediate.
The challenge with Scottish English is mostly just about learning how they modify their pronunciation of English. Without having it explained to me, I was able to go from not understanding Limmy's Show, to understanding nearly all of it, simply by watching a lot of episodes and getting used to his accent.
Id say its a bit more, I need azeri speakers to speak slowly there are quite some terms that I need to take an educated guess at. (para=pul for instance)
Maybe you’re right 🤔 The Azeri people I interacted had very clear accent than the average. So I guess we can lower the assumption to %70? 🙂
70% is fair think when theyre talking to me, but if theyre talking with eachother it drops dramatically lol.
scottish english might be a good analogy. If they talk to someone who only knows plain english they will take that into account, but amongst eachother youd be lucky to get the general gist of the topic at hand.