Dear Don,

Einar Haugen's 1996 paper dealt with this kind of communication
between the Danes, Swedes and Norwegians, who can and do mutually
communicate in their own respective languages yet understand each
other, given a certain amount of good will. Haugen probably did not
name that kind of communication, but that article of his is well-
known for the notion of 'semicommunication' which he defined as
a 'trickle of messages through a rather high level of code 'noise''.
The code noise can be due to differences between languages, which is
actualised precisely in the kind of bilingual interlingual
communication you have described. It is often termed 'receptive
bilingualism' (or 'receptive multilingualism'), and it has been
dealt with also with Romance and Slavonic languages (here namely
Czech and Slovak, or Czech-Slovak-Polish, and marginally Belarusian-
Russian), and very possibly with other languages as well. I can
recommend these papers:

Haugen, E. (1996): Semicommunication: the language gap in
Scandinavia. Sociological Inquiry, 36 (2), 280-297.

Braunmüller, K. (2002): Semicommunication and accommodation:
observations from the linguistic situation in Scandinavia.
International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 12 (1), 1-23.



--- In code-switching@yahoogroups.com, "Don Osborn" <dzo@...> wrote:
>
> I've a really basic linguistic question (I think): what does one
call
> the situation where two speakers communicate each in their own
tongue
> but understand each other's speech? It's not codeswitching as I
> understand the term, since each speaker is more or less
consistently
> using one tongue.
>
> Over the years I often ran into situations where people would say
that
> they understood ("hear") another tongue, but couldn't speak it. I
have
> only rarely witnessed exchanges on this basis (at least where I
could
> identify that each conversants was pretty much consistently using
> something different from the other), but read about it in the case
of
> Ndonga and Kwanyama in Namibia (these are very close, like
dialects of
> the same language, Oshiwambo).
>
> TIA for any info.
>
> Don Osborn
>