In essence, such kinds of bilingualism also improve understanding of other, unrelated Slavic languages, since two Slavic languages fill in the comprehension gaps. I also have formal training in several Slavic languages, which make most of them, except some of the Balkan ones, pretty much comprehensibe to me. Mutually Intelligible And Different. She introduces her and her two friends from the Czech republic and Spain, Because she speaks very clearly and slowly, I understand everything between 0:25-0:32, but then she starts a fast flood of words and between 0:32-0:36 I basically hear only s. Paul McGrane. For example, those who learn Ukrainian will eventually know 70% of Polish lexicon and a . Complaints have been made that many of these percentages were simply wild guesses with no science behind them. You are a smart guy. Hello, the difference of course is completely arbitrary, but above 90%, most speakers regard their comprehension as full or say things like I understand it completely. Below 90%, it starts getting a lot more iffy, and down towards 80-85%, people start saying things like, I understand most of it but not all! and people start regarding the other tongue as possibly a separate language. Buzet is actually transitional between Slovenian and Kajkavian. They are essentially the same language and even somebody with virgin ears can understand anybody almost perfectly, as long as he has half a brain. This is the first time that this has been done using just . I am not saying this to slam Ukrainians, but just an observation. Ni Torlak uses a definite suffix, -ta/-to/-ti/-te/-ta (fem.sg/neu.sg/masc.pl/fem.pl/neu.pl), but less frequently than Macedonian does, and only in the nominative; it doesnt have a distance contrast as it does in standard Macedonian but it isnt even present in Serbian to begin with Older people who rembember federation understand everything. In this case, another criteria I would also consider is how hard or easy it is for a Serb to start understanding Macedonian. I also understand more of other Slavic languages then neotokavian speakers do. Nice article, but I think there is a difference between spoken mutual intelligibility and different languages. What language is closest to Polish? Three different methods were used: a word translation task, a cloze test and a picture task. Polish and Ukrainian have higher lexical similarity at 72%, and Ukrainian intelligibility of Polish is ~50%+. When you find out it is a separate language, you ask for %, and they often tell you! Linguistic distance is the name for the concept of calculating a measurement for how different languages are from one another. plenty of prepositions are used in a similar, if not identical, manner; to name an example, na is used in both Macedonian and Ni Torlak as a replacement for the Serbian genitive, in addition to its standard use as on(to) This phenomenon is called asymmetrical mutual intelligibility. Rather than 95%, or 85%. Then she talks about the cards in the bags, I again understand everything, but at 0:47, another stream of unintelligible sounds is starting. From the 1500s to 1900, a large corpus of Kajkavian literature was written. Im Slovenian, my mother tongue is Slovenian, however I have also learnt Serbo-Croatian from a very early age. PS More than half of Slovenian seems to be closely related to Kaikavian and Chakavian Croatian (and probably Old Shtokavian which is almost extinct). Here are three critical ways in which Bulgarian and Russian speakers differ. I met Croats from Zagreb and they speak Slovenian perfectly. For instance, Portuguese and Spanish have a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility, but theyre technically separate languages. This is not necessarily correct in terms of vocabulary, but you will find a lot in common in the grammatical rules . Pretty accurate I think. However, lexical similarity focuses on exclusively overlapping vocabulary to determine similarity between languages. A koine is currently under development. Other Western Slovak speakers (Bratislava) say that Eastern Slovak (Kosice) is hard to understand. Intelligibility between Balachka and Ukrainian is not known. Still others (for example, Voegelin and Voegelin 1977) recognize just two main dialect groups: Eastern and Western Ukrainian. He conducts his interviews in Macedonian, and as you can watch , his guests, be they bulgarians, serbs, bosnians, croats have no trouble understanding his questions. (Download). However, Russian is only 74% mutually intelligible with spoken Belarusian and 50% mutually intelligible with spoken Ukrainian. I think Robert has done articles on 9/11 conspiracy theories and their level of crediblity, yeah. However, there are dialects in between Ukrainian and Russian such as the Eastern Polissian and Slobozhan dialects of Ukrainian that are intelligible with both languages. It is best seen as a Ukrainian dialect spoken in Russia specifically, it is markedly similar to the Poltavian dialect of Ukrainian spoken in Poltava in Central Ukraine. The Polish langauge uses the Latin script, while the Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic. Pannonian Rusyn is actually a part of Slovak, and Rusyn proper is really a part of Ukrainian. If you're russian you understand the meaning of what other is saying to a degree of around 80%. Ukrainians needs to make small preparation to become able for listening comprehension of Polish. Slovak is closely related to Czech, to the point of mutual intelligibility to a very high degree, as well as Polish.Like other Slavic languages, Slovak is a fusional language with a complex system of morphology and relatively flexible word order. December 2014. [8], However, others have suggested that these objections are misguided, as they collapse different concepts of what constitutes a "language".[9]. The Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family is known for its languages being relatively closely related. I got that figure from a Serb. Russian only has 60% intelligibility of Balachka. The Lemko dialect of Rusyn has only marginal intelligibility with Ukrainian. So here you have a case, when I could not understand everything, but I could grasp the meaning (at least). They say, ~60%, ~65%, etc. For me, Serbian and Macedonian are as different as Serbian and Slovene, they sounds somehow the same, but I dont understand them correctly. I can only speak from my personal experience (business trips to Czech Republic - Ostrava, Praha, Mlad Boleslav, Mikulov ). Classifications may also shift for reasons external to the languages themselves. Torlakian (considered a subdialect of Serbian Old Shtokavian by some) has significant mutual intelligibility with Macedonian and Bulgarian. My gues. The Russian language in the Ukraine has been declining recently mostly because since independence, the authorities have striven to make the new Ukrainian as far away from Russian as possible by adopting the Kharkiv Standard adopted in 1927 and jettisoning the 1932 Standard which brought Ukrainian more in line with Russian. That is good to know. Another similar example would be varieties of Arabic, which additionally share a single prestige variety in Modern Standard Arabic. theres a macedonian TV program called Vo Centar, hosted by a macedoanian journalist who goes around the Balkans and interviews prominent names in politics etc. Serbians and Bosnians not so such. Spanish and Catalan have a lexical similarity of 85%. Since then, Slovak has been disappearing from the Czech Republic, so the younger people dont understand Slovak so well. I have the hardest time to understand anything of Bulgarian, it sounds really fast and choppy but similar to Russian sometimes. It may seem that Polish and Russian are mutually intelligible because they both come from the same language family and share a lot of similarities. Once you pick up those basic 50 words, understanding Macedonian becomes super easy that was my experience with Macedonian friends (the few of them who dont speak Serbian). Thread starter Bamaro; Start date Feb 15, 2023 . Polish: 5% ????? You can pick out the common words like Voda (water), Hleb (bread), zima (cold) and so forth but it is tough to get the jist of what they are saying with out more immersion. possession is indicated most frequently using dative pronouns, unlike Serbians tendency to use possessive pronouns in greater frequency In Linguistics, this MI stuff is noncontroversial. Polish, Ukrainian and even Serbo-Croatian dialects are less so, especially in the light of their geographical spread . For example we chakavians use a lot of words used in Polish, Ukrainian, Slovak etc but in standard Croatian those words are described as archaisms and instead words used in tokavian come from Turkish. Sorry I can`t give you percentage. Basically, you only hear a series of consonants with hardly recognizable vowels. Czech: 10% I cannot understand that much of kajkavski nor akavski, but I can understand more akavski than I can kajkavski. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9 There is one factor they dont know about the internet. Belarussian is nonetheless a separate language from both Ukrainian and Russian. Ukrainian and Belarusian are mutually intelligible and in general very close and have some common features like synthetical future, but Russian speakers (who know only Russian) only partially understand Ukrainian/Belarusian. Most of the Ukrainian speakers who do not speak Russian are in Canada at the moment. To deal with the conflict in cases such as Arabic, Chinese and German, the term Dachsprache (a sociolinguistic "umbrella language") is sometimes seen: Chinese and German are languages in the sociolinguistic sense even though speakers of some varieties cannot understand each other without recourse to a standard or prestige form. Northern Germanic languages spoken in Scandinavia form a dialect continuum where two furthermost dialects have almost no mutual intelligibility. I confess to not being a linguist, and therefore didnt see past the problematic sentence How close is Ukrainian language to Polish? Menu. While not usually considered mutually intelligible, theres also enough similarity between French and Italian that speakers of Portuguese may understand both of these languages. Regarding Polish and Russian there are many words with opposite meaning. I also worked in a resteraunt with lots of west and south slavs there and I have to say that Serbian and crotian has a lot of ilarities with Slovak. I would like to add an interesting fact Slovenian has very harsh dialects due to the historic separation of different regions. Czechs see Slovaks as country bumpkins backwards and folksy but optimistic, outgoing and friendly. The Chinese language, on the other hand, is comprised of a number of dialects that arent always mutually intelligible. An academic paper has been published making the case for a separate Balachka language. Although most words are in fact different, they are largely similar, being cognates, which makes both languages mutually intelligible to a significant extent; . But I can tell you this. Generally, when foreigners say speakers of a certain language speak too fast, speakers of that language can hear that fast speech just fine. Albeit, Scots dialect is far more pronounced than English, and at times, can be unintelligible. You would be amazed at how good peoples estimates of this sort of thing are though. In addition, political and social conventions often override considerations of mutual intelligibility in both scientific and non-scientific views. JohnUK. Problem is the spoken form, as Bulgarians dont speak as it is written, which is the case with serbian or croatian. It is important to note that the idea of this paper was try to test "pure inherent intelligibility." A pure inherent intelligibility test would involve a couple of things. The truth is that a person can often understand other dialects, except his native one. (I will come to Bulgarian too). It has also been described as a transitional dialect between Polish and Slovak. I think (as a native Serbian speaker from south eastern Belgrade) the main difference between Serbian and Macedonian is that Macedonian doesnt have cases and have definite articles as well. It was for me a bit strange, because Bulgarian science still supports the thesis that Macedonian is Bulgarian. People observing conversation between Cieszyn Silesian and Upper Silesian report that they have a hard time understanding each other. Slobozhan Russian can also be called Kuban Russian or Balachka. [2], Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible,[3] although there are also similarities among different sign languages. There can be huge differences between spoken/written forms of a Slavic language, because the written form may have a very similar vocabulary, phonology and grammar, but due to a different, strong stress, you wont understand almost anything. Maybe I could offer you somehow help? 50% 70%? Additionally, Norwegian assimilated a considerable amount of Danish vocabulary as well as traditional Danish expressions. . We found that Czech and Slovak have by far the highest level of mutual intelligibility, followed by Croatian and Slovene. I once had a conversation with a young woman from the Czech Republic. Because so many Slavic languages are national languages, they tend to have pretty big populations. It's not learning, but for become understanding - Ukrainian must listen Polish language from some hours to some days to get used to very specific pronunciation. Hello, can you tell me, how much Kajkavian can your average Chakavian speaker understand in percentage? A Moravian Czech speaker (Eastern Czech) and a Bratislavan Slovak (Western Slovak) speaker understand each other very well. It is time to stop believing to the politically motivated propaganda about our languages and start telling the truth. We in Serbia even had some comic movies that was making fun of south Serbian dialects (that are more related to Bulgarian and Macedonian) with very mocking or even rude comments for someone who make mistakes in the word cases. http://www.network54.com/Forum/84302/thread/1284248981/last-1288620675/The+real+9-11+cover+up-+Political+hijacking++was+originally+aimed+at+Russia, http://www.network54.com/Forum/84302/thread/1289113786/last-1289113786/British+intelligence+links+to+African+Emabssy+bombings, http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/sheikhmedia.htm, http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists/usama-bin-laden/view, http://ifaq.wap.org/society/voweldeployment.html, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58Aog4AJdQM, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1n9KMawa-8, https://www.academia.edu/4080349/Mutual_Intelligibility_of_Languages_in_the_Slavic_Family, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9, https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D1%8A%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8_%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%B8%D0%BA, Alt Left: Ukrainian Nazis Execute Two of Their Own Men for Refusing to Fight, The Conquest of Germany and Japan Never Ended, Protected: Post to Discuss All of the Various POIs and Theories in the Delphi Murders from the Crime to the Present, Protected to Avoid Libel and Character Assassination Part 10, NATO Helped the Ukrainians Fire All Those Drones at Russia, Including all the Way to Moscow, The Conquest and Destruction of Russia Project Goes Way Back to Post World War 2, The Jewish Conspiracy To Subject Humankind. Ive not read em myself. A primary challenge to these positions is that speakers of closely related languages can often communicate with each other effectively if they choose to do so. But, as the goal of the OP was to debunk the myth that says every slavic speaker can understand each other, he is quite right on that. No idea, but if they are fairly intelligent as she sounds like she is, you might be shocked at how she might be able to rattle off some estimated figures like that. Thats why in the Czechoslovak army the rule was: speak your own language, understand both. A Serbian native speaker felt that the percentages for South Slavic seemed to be accurate. If youre learning multiple languages at once, pairing similar languages is a great way to maximize your studying. Clearly it WAS the Illuminati at workI guess the planes were flown by shapeshifting lizards, toooh, come to think of it, isnt George Bush Junior a lizard, too! Some people in Croatia asked me if I speak Kajkavian when I spoke Slovenian with my friends. As such, spoken Danish and Swedish normally have low mutual intelligibility,[2] but Swedes in the resund region (including Malm and Helsingborg), across a strait from the Danish capital Copenhagen, understand Danish somewhat better, largely due to the proximity of the region to Danish-speaking areas. I grew up as a Ukrainian speaker in North America. I can understand quite a bit of basic polish when it is spoken on the street, but their pronunciation is so weird its hard to notice sometimes. Hag_Boulder 9 mo. Many Turkic languages are mutually intelligible to a higher or lower degree, but thorough empirical research is needed to establish the exact levels and patterns of mutual intelligibility between the languages of this linguistic family. If you can speak Russian fluently, you will be able to understand 77% of Polish words, while Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, and . While discussing mutual intelligibility, the author often calls upon bilingual learning; for example, Czech and Slovak are considered highly intelligible because of the strong cross-cultural overlap. Also akavian has some elements of its own. Ukrainians can understand Russian much better than the other way around. (j/k) Ive been following this page and kept coming to it for the past months, actually more than a year (and have noticed some updates). Im a speaker of Torlakian Serbian characteristically closer to Macedonian than Standard Serbian, having three (nom/acc/voc) cases and using a fusional instead of an analytic past tense and, with regards to a certain comment made two years ago on here, can, without issue, understand Zona Zamfirova, a movie about life in Ottoman Ni, without any subtitles. Croatian (Stokavski): 98% Maybe it is true for two persons from the opposite end of the dialect continium (Hrvatsko Zagorje and Strumica), that have never been out of their villages and try to communicate on their respective native dialects. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in . pouv cyrilici, a bantsk norma, kter pouv latinku. My mother is a native Croatian speaker and she told me that serbian and croatian have very good intelligibility but however the grammar is very different.Comparing those two languages would be like comparing czech and slovakian. It is often said that Ukrainian and Russian are intelligible with each other or even that they are the same language (a view perpetuated by Russian nationalists). Is Ukrainian mutually intelligible with Polish? But which languages in the world are actually closest to . Likewise with Polish vs Czech, and Slovenian vs Standard Croatian (these pairs are the most commonly mistaken as mutually intelligible). This has, however, more to do with the new Ukrainian norm. Polish has 22% intelligibility of Silesian, 12% of Czech, 6% of Russian, and 5% of Bulgarian. Thanks so much for this post. Between sources, you might find some claiming that two languages are mutually intelligible, while other sources claim those same languages arent. Ikavian Chakavian has two branches Southwestern Istrian and Southern Chakavian. Method: It is important to note that the percentages are in general only for oral intelligibility and only in the case of a situation of a pure inherent intelligibility test. Spanish has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with Galician, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Sardinian and French. However, it appears to be a separate language, as Lach is not even intelligible within itself. So give these mutually intelligible languages a second look. I can grasp only something in the sense that these four periods have different names and that they dont designate different languages (delene e uslovno i imenata ne otrazjavat razlini ezici), but only periods of the development of Bulgarian (samo periodi v razvitieto na balgarskija ezik), with typical changes or features (za koito se otkrivat charakterni belezi). Some famous linguists who are acquaintances of mine (they have Wikipedia pages) told me that they thought that 90% was a good metric. Part of the problem between Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian is that so many of the basic words be, do, this, that, where are different, however, much of the rest of the vocabulary is the same. I can understand about 50% 75% of Bulgarian and Macedonian enough to get buy and carry on a conversation. This gives rise to claims of Macedonians being able to understand Serbo-Croatian very well, however, much of this may be due to bilingual learning. In this week's Slavic languages comparison we talk about animals in Polish and Ukrainian. I can understand anyone who speaks English, even those who speak it as foreigners might say too fast. Slovene has some commonalities with the West Slavic languages. However, in terms of vocabulary Ukrainian is closer to Polish, from which it has borrowed a large number of words. Was he educated? Istorieskoto mu razvitie se charakterizira s etiri glavni perioda. Also what is a dialect and what is a language? becomes confusing for me since I can say a sentence in Kai/Cha thats almost the same in Slovene but different in BSCM standards. Despite all of this, Ukrainian and Russian aren't the closest languages in the Slavic language family, and they're not even mutually intelligible. Its mainly in the weird Bulgarian grammar! About Boyko/Hutsul dialects which according to you are more understandable to Russian person than Ukrainian language I will disagree with you. Also sorry for my English. I admit that my prehistoric learning of Russian (1985-1990) made it easier for me to guess the meaning of words izpolzovana a saestvuvat (which have the same meaning in Russian), but I think that I could guess it even from the context. some things in this article are heavily exaggerated. I think that this article is full of dubious numbers, but this is not necessarily the authors fault. The grammar in both languages is similar, but, predictably, there are a few differences: While Ukrainian includes the past continuous tense, there are only three tenses in Russian (past, present and future). During the last 20 years, Ukraine has tried to make the language norm as far from Russian as possible for nationalistic reasons. And if you're perhaps a polyglot or linguaphile looking for a new challenge, then maybe learning a bit of Mandarin, Urdu, or even Persian might just be up your alley! People from Lviv and larger cities and towns in western Ukraine have a slight clipped accent but they speak standard Ukrainian. 5 (2): 135146. I also conclude that in terms of straight linguistic science anyway, Czech and Slovak are simply one language called Czechoslovakian. I am a native Czech speaker, I understand Slovak (a lot of exposure, many visits, many colleagues) and Russian (studied at school, many visits) in all three languages I am close 100% understanding of news, yet for Polish, Ukrainian and Croat I would rate my understanding at 15-20%, with no significant improvement just from being in the country (I have spent in total about 20 weeks in Croatia, 4 in Ukraine, 3 in Poland). Briefly put, mutual intelligibility is when speakers of one language can understand a related language to some degree. Yes, there are some words, which has Ukraine origins, but trust me that its not so hard to understand. It exists in differing degrees among many related or geographically proximate languages of the world, often in the context of a dialect continuum. I would say that Macedonian is about 25% intelligible to a Serbian speaker that was never exposed to Macedonian. Bulgarian is a pluricentric language it has several literary norms. He alleges that Sheikh later double-crossed British intelligence. Much of the language has changed lots of Turkish loans have been dropped, plenty of standard Serbian terminology has made its way in but Ive had less of a communication issue in Kumanovo (north-eastern Macedonia) than Belgrade (capital of Serbia) back when I was but a young lad. Ni Torlak has six vowels the standard /a e i o u/ and a reduced schwa // thats found where a strong yer once used to be, as in