There are numerous intelligibility tests out there that work very well, or you can just ask native speakers to give you a %, and most of the honest ones will tell you; in fact, they will often differentiate between oh that is our language, they speak the same language as us, for dialects and then no, that is not our language, that is different, and they do not speak our language for separate languages. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? I can only speak from my personal experience (business trips to Czech Republic - Ostrava, Praha, Mlad Boleslav, Mikulov ). Because mutual intelligibility comes in varying degrees, its hard to determine how much overlap there needs to be for something to be classified as such. Its often said that all Slavic languages are mutually intelligible with each other. Im Slovenian, my mother tongue is Slovenian, however I have also learnt Serbo-Croatian from a very early age. Macedonian: 50-60 % A Serbian friend of mine was estaunished to see how some Macedonian celebrities speak Serbian on the TV without accent. possession is indicated most frequently using dative pronouns, unlike Serbians tendency to use possessive pronouns in greater frequency My guest from Ukraine will have to guess 6 animals that I'll describe to her in Polish. Ive yet to see a speaker of BCS that recognizes the obvious: these three languages are just the same. I use Ethnologues list of languages and dialects, but extend it a bit. 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. The problem is that native speakers can understand other speakers of their own language. I speak tokavski croatian (and can read and understand serbian (both cyrillic and latin) and can adapt my croatian to be more serbian grammatically and with vocabulary) and just recently I had a conversation where I spoke croatian and the other person spoke polish. Thus, this exposure gives them an edge when trying to understand Czech. Their mutual intelligibility varies greatly, between the dialects themselves, with Shtokavian, and with other languages. Kajkavian is fairly uniform across its speech area, whereas Chakavian is more diverse (Jembrigh 2014). However, many of these dialects are at least partially mutually intelligible. Re: Cz/Slo I was born in Upper State and I can barely understand some southern speakers.Do you think the politics in USA is also preventing the formation of new languages ? I use Wikipedia as a reference for new languages that Wikipedia misses, like the 4 Croatian languages. Ukrainian much less comprehensible. For me, Serbian and Macedonian are as different as Serbian and Slovene, they sounds somehow the same, but I dont understand them correctly. 2 Ukrainian Phrasebook And Dictionary Paperback 1-03-2023 Mutually Intelligible? It is more like the other slavic languages (v instead of u, z instead of s, itd, less vowels, and no distinction between and ). General Musharraf says that Sheikh, who orchestrated the abduction, was recruited by MI6 while he was studying at the London School of Economics and sent to the Balkans to take part in jihad operations there. Its historical development consists of four main periods. But then it is difficult. 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. BULGARIAN (transferred to the Latin script): algarskijat ezik e indoevropejski ezik ot grupata na junoslavjanskite ezici. Its true that Slavic languages are not intelligible in the taking-the-first-person-from-the-street-and-making-them-listen-to-a-random-conversation way, that is, an average Slavic speaker with an untrained ear and little to no exposure to other Slavic languages will have difficulty understanding other Slavic languages. Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. Serbia is large and you should also ask Serbians in other regions. English professor. 99% of people in Ukraine are bilinguals who essentially speak and learn both Russian and Ukrainian from birth (although depending on the region, ones prevailence over the other varies). Thank you very much for this. Donations are the only thing that keep the site operating. Polish, Ukrainian and even Serbo-Croatian dialects are less so, especially in the light of their geographical spread . The historical development is characterized by four main periods. Conclusion: Burgenland Croatian, spoken in Austria, is intelligible to Croatian speakers in Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, but it has poor intelligibility with the Croatian spoken in Croatia. "The Linguistic Innovation Emerging From Rohingya Refugees." The revelation comes from General Musharrafs memoir, In the Line of Fire, which begins serialisation in The Times today and will further embarrass the White House at a time when relations between the US and Pakistan are already strained.. Pakistani intelligence chiefs are concerned that General Musharraf may jeopardise their relationship with British intelligence agencies after claiming that a convicted terrorist was once an MI6 informer. There is much nonsense said about the mutual intelligibility of the various languages in the Slavic family. Even little kids who watch the show understand. One more thing is that Serbian has, for example, two versions of the future case, with da (that) and verb in some person form, 1st in this case: ja u da radim (I will work) and ja u raditi where raditi (to work) is an infinitive. Thank you. Speaking of myself, after calculating everything, I can understand to specific degree Slovene, somewhat Slovak/Russian, Serbo-Croatian std without problems and also Macedonians. 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. Thanks for the information about Eastern Slovak I will incorporate it. However, in recent years, there has also been quite a bit of bilingual learning. The Torlakian spoken in the southeast is different. Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family. Still others (for example, Voegelin and Voegelin 1977) recognize just two main dialect groups: Eastern and Western Ukrainian. I will tell you also this: This comment is fantastic! It is rather controversial outside Linguistics, as you run into nationalists and other fools who emotionally distort things. If you choose to learn a language which is at least to some extent mutually intelligible to a language you already know . If speakers of one language have more exposure to its related language, theyre likely to pick up more of that language. Russia) in Canada, and they barely can understand standard Ukrainian. Was he from Belgrade or Novi Sad or Nis? This phenomenon is called asymmetrical mutual intelligibility. [1] I speak Slovenian and Croats think that I can speak Kaikavian. The problem is that most linguists are not interested in scientific intelligibility testing of language pairs. Its vocabulary has lots of common words with all of Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, so it's sort of mutually intelligible with all of them. Furthermore, there is a dialect continuum between Kajkavian and Chakavian as there is between Kajkavian and Slovenian, and lects with a dialect continuum between them are always separate languages. [2], Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible,[3] although there are also similarities among different sign languages. Also, the question is: -did this Serb speak other Slavic languages? In Czech rep. Slovaks dont have to pass any language exams (the other foreigner do have to). What languages are mutually intelligible with Russian? I must confess that as a Czech, I understand only little, what the Macedonian reporter is saying, and when I was listening to the first guy from Bosnia (Izetbegovi), I was often lost, understanding only slightly more, maybe 20-30%. Russian. Hence the figures are averages taken from statements by native speakers of the languages in question. Kashubian itself is a macrolanguage made up of two different languages, South Kashubian and North Kashubian, as the two have difficult intelligibility. http://ifaq.wap.org/society/voweldeployment.html. Speakers of the Torlak dialect (any Torlak dialect) understand Serbo-Croation, Macedonian and Bulgarian with no problem, and can comprehand Slovenian as much as 80-90% within a few weeks of exposure. But akavian being archaic it has old slavic package. Can a Russian speaker understand Polish? Its mainly in the weird Bulgarian grammar! LIFESTYLE Languages. In brief, there is some mutual intelligibility, enough to have a simple conversation of the 'me Tarzan - you Jane' type, speakin. If you choose to study a language thats mutually intelligible with one you already know, chances are youll have to put a lot less work in than if you were learning a language from scratch. Written intelligibility is higher at 25%. If you take your 25 (supposedly from Novi Sad) and 90 from Nis, then we come to about 60 percent (from Serbian side). I dont know about Macedonian (havent ever heard or read it) but it seems to be like in the middle between Serbian and Bulgarian (just like frisian is in the middle of dutch and english). Between some languages, there can also be imbalanced mutual intelligibility, known as asymmetric intelligibility. This occurs when speakers of one language can understand a related language to a greater degree than speakers of the related language can understand the other. The Polish alphabet includes certain additional letters formed using diacritics: the kreska in the letters , , , , and through the letter in ; the kropka in the letter , and the ogonek ("little . Then tokavian person reaction would be: What? Another similar example would be varieties of Arabic, which additionally share a single prestige variety in Modern Standard Arabic. This debate occurred only in Croatian linguistic circles, and the public knows nothing about it (Jembrigh 2014). However, any suggestions that Kajkavian is a separate language are censored on Croatian TV (Jembrigh 2014). Portuguese has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with Spanish, Galician, French and Italian. The claim for separate languages is based more on politics than on linguistic science. There was a lot of past Yugoslav politics that hid the truth. The reason that these languages seem to be mutually intelligible is because almost all Ukrainians are bilingual anyway, and capable of switching between the two at will. While Norway was under Danish rule, the Bokml written standard of Norwegian developed from Dano-Norwegian, a koin language that evolved among the urban elite in Norwegian cities during the later years of the union. But they are unaware of the fact that islander have a lot of latin but also old Croatian (Slavic) words instead of Turkish which are used by supossedly more Croatian tokavian speaker. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-YqET96OO0&fs=1&hl=en_GB]. ENGLISH: Bulgarian language is an Indo-European language from the group of South-Slavic languages. Jen. His level of understanding might be 90%, or 82%, 85%. Kids speak both languages, as well as English, fluently. Around 80% comprehension, it gets hard to talk about complex or technical things. | Animals | Slavic Languages Comparison The Best Online German Learning Resources Ukrainian phrases Ukrainian Phrasebook And Dictionary Paperback Lonely Planet: The world's leading travel guide publisher. I am not saying this to slam Ukrainians, but just an observation. True science would involve scientific intelligibility testing of Slavic language pairs. Polish and Russian while Slavic sounding to my ear and is maybe 5%-15% intelligible . Polish and Ukrainian have higher lexical similarity at 72%, and Ukrainian intelligibility of Polish is ~50%+. akavski has considerably more italian influence, due to many of the people there speaking italian (vicinity to italy) and the presence of istriot language and the former presence of dalmatian language. Czechs hardly ever study at Slovak universities. Price, Glanville (1971), French Language: Present and Past, Jameson Books, Pope, Mildred K. From Latin to French, with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman. And when islanders respond back in akavian they are puzzled: What? For example, the varieties of Chinese are often considered a single language even though there is usually no mutual intelligibility between geographically separated varieties. This is a Chakavian-Slovenian transitional lect that is hard to categorize, but it is usually considered to be a Slovenian dialect. As far as grammars are concerned (declension and conjugation), they are so similar that there is almost no effort in understanding that this noun is, for example, in dative plural, and that verb is imperfective past. Also there have been some czecho-slovak shows in TV lately like Czecho-Slovak Idol or Talent with judges and competitors from both countries and I have never heard of anyone who would complain about not understanding. However, the Croatian macrolanguage has strange lects that Standard Croatian (tokavian) cannot understand. 2023 Enux Education Limited. What sort of Slav nation are you a part of my friend? The post-1991 reforms of the Ukrainian language were not an introduction of Polish or Western Ukrainian as some Russian nationalists (and non-nationalists, who believe them) claim, but rather a return to a standard adopted in Kharkiv in 1927. Slovenian while it sounds slavic to me is not intelligible at all save for a few words here and there. And Im glad he didnt felt in the nonsense babble of serbians, croats and bosnians that try too hard to show their differences, due to political/religious reasons. As a native Russian speaker, I noticed that my understanding of Polish went from 20% to 70% in a matter of hours when watching a film in Polish with subtitles. Instead Eastern Lach and Western Lach have difficult intelligibility and are separate languages, so Lach itself is a macrolanguage. Slovak has 91% intelligibility of Czech. 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. 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. Are Russian and Polish mutually intelligible? Rural variations are usually less mutually intelligible. So I understood 100% But I admit that it was a relatively very easy text. It differs from the rest of Silesian in that it has undergone heavy Czech influence. Hutsul, Lemko, Boiko speech (small Ukrainian/Rusyn dialects) stangely enough, more comprehensible than standard Ukrainian. Although most words are in fact different, they are largely similar, being cognates, which makes both languages mutually intelligible to a significant extent; . Pannonian Rusyn lacks full intelligibility of Rusyn proper. My gues. This is great. In my opinion Czech and Slovak mutual intelligibility is not heavily exaggerated but actually very underrated(or some opposite word of exagerated, sorry for my poor english). Polish is a disgusting sounding language. can take anywhere. Polish: Ukrainian and Belarusian (both partially; moreover, . Most Macedonians already are able to speak Serbo-Croatian well. 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. Kajkavian is probably closer to Slovenian than it is to Chakavian. Russians, they usually need some adaptation time (and of course they need to be willing to try -- which is not always the case, since many Russians are monolingual and . I believe I also met Croats from Zagreb that never learn Slovenian or live in Slovenia and I thought they are native Slovenian speakers because they can speak Slovenian perfectly. It is not that hard. What Are Mutually Intelligible Languages? Also after studying Ethnologue for a very long time, I noticed that they tended to use 90% as a cutoff for language versus dialect most but not all of the time. Serbs until recently where still self titled Yugoslavs. If the Torlaks can understand those languages it is because they have been hearing them! 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 It is true that Western Slovak dialects can understand Czech well, but Central Slovak, Eastern Slovak and Extraslovakian Slovak dialects cannot. He alleges that Sheikh later double-crossed British intelligence. 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. (Jim Morrison). Chakavian has a low mutual intelligibility with either, in part due to its large number of loanwords from Venetian. You cannot simply separate the articles from the words during a regular conversation. For majority of the Shtokavian speakers thats just another language: different grammar, vocabulary, pronunciations, even sounds (Kai has at least 9 vowels while Shto Croatian only 5 for example). Im Czech . You are wrong about Slovenian and Croatian languages. Chakavian has 82% intelligibility of Kajkavian. My family comes from Kaikavian (50%), Chakavian (25%) and Shtokavian (25%) areas, but at home, especially last years, we prefer to use only Kaikavian-Chakavian. Even the basic words are almost the same. The Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family is known for its languages being relatively closely related. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in . Russian has low intelligibility with Czech and Slovak, maybe 30%. On the other hand, it can be difficult for Russians to understand Ukrainian (though it is easy for them to learn it). German is partially mutually intelligible with Yiddish and Dutch. As a native of Ni, I can say that the Serbo-CroatianMacedonian figures might be roughly on-point. How this is measured varies, but mutual intelligibility and vocabulary overlap, and often play a role in these calculations. Every major language has some dialects Also both sides are able to use standard Slovak. Ponaszymu appears to lack full intelligibility with Czech. Polish is spoken outside of Poland by Polish diaspora groups in countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom. They sometimes say that youngsters do not but that is just a myth. Click here to get a copy. between Ni Torlak and Macedonian than between either of those two and Serbian Have every heard of Dubrovnik dialect? Look at this Polish girl: Polish lacks full intelligibility of Silesian, although this is controversial (see below). It is an official language of the Bulgarian republic and one of 23 official languages of the European Union. Do Ukrainians and Polish like each other? This is the first time that this has been done using just . Ukrainians and Belarusians understand each other's languages with no problem. Kajkavian was removed from public use after 1900, hence writing in the standard Kajkavian literary language was curtailed. For example, British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) are quite different and mutually unintelligible, even though the hearing people of the United Kingdom and the United States share the same spoken language. Spoken Slovenian is a surprise too its phonology has a significant German influence. Personal communication. Menu. Of course, the interviews are subtitled in Macedonian, but even an untrained ear and eye can see how similar these languages are. There is a big problem with this. The base of Molise Croatian was Shtokavian with an Ikavian accent and a heavy Chakavian base similar to what is now spoken as Southern Kajkavian Ikavian on the islands of Croatia. You are a smart guy. His wife had never been to Poland and her language was completely foreign to me. This is simply not the case. [2], Because of the difficulty of imposing boundaries on a continuum, various counts of the Romance languages are given; in The Linguasphere register of the worlds languages and speech communities David Dalby lists 23 based on mutual intelligibility:[13]. This is not the case, as all figures were derived from estimates by native speakers themselves, often a number of estimates averaged together. I met Croats from Zagreb and they speak Slovenian perfectly. It has been massively updated with a lot of new research from controlled scientific intelligibility studies. Additionally, Norwegian assimilated a considerable amount of Danish vocabulary as well as traditional Danish expressions. In 1933, reforms were forced that streamlined Ukrainian more in line with the Russian language. However, all three languages - Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian - are in part mutually intelligible, and already knowing one can help a lot if you want to learn one of the . Mutual intelligibility also occurs in a wide variety of degrees, ranging from none, to partial, to full mutual intelligibility. I have to really focus and try hard to understand them but with patience I can get buy. In writing, however, Scots language looks similar to English (albeit with some spelling variations). Silesian or Upper Silesian is also a separate language spoken in Poland, often thought to be halfway between Polish and Czech. Nevertheless Ukrainian intelligibility of Russian is hard to calculate because presently there are few Ukrainians in Ukraine who do not speak Russian. A Slovak from Bratislava can and does understand eastern Slovak dialects, he might have to tune his ear a bit, but I know because Ive talked to many members of my family about this and other Slovaks and they all say it sounds really stupid and a few words are different but they definantly understand. Because of all of this, tokavian speaker has a hard time understanding fast talking akavian speakers. Eastern Slovak has ~80% intelligibility of Rusyn. cheers Maltese. In other cases, I had to rely on the context. Contents1 Can Slovenians understand Croatian?2 What languages are mutually intelligible with Croatian?3 What is the closest language to Slovenian?4 Which two . A lect called iarija Slovenian is spoken on the Istrian Peninsula in Slovenia just north of Croatia. "Proto-Slavonic,". I have no idea, what Sledva da se otbelei, e tova means. 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). Complicating the picture is the fact that many Ukrainians are bilingual and speak Russian also. Rather than 95%, or 85%. What language is closest to Polish? This is heartening, although Kajkavian as an existing spoken lect also needs to be recognized as a living language instead of a dialect of Croatian, whatever that word means. I must admit that knowing English, German and French also helped me since Polish readily uses borrowings from these languages where Russian prefers Slavic words. So they speak Macedonian to me and I speak Serbian to them, and we understand each other perfectly. Glad to hear you are steering clear of it. This makes Polish a much much easier language to learn than Russian. In other words, Ukrainian speakers can often understand Russian, while Russian speaker doesn't understand Ukrainian, especially Russian speakers from outside Ukraine. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in writing. Yes and if you could more than one listener, it would be great. Polish 5 % spoken, 20 % written Its spelling, however, is quite different from any of them. In this week's Slavic languages comparison, we talk about animals in Polish and Ukrainian. The literary language itself is no longer written, but works written in it are still used in public for instance in dramas and church masses (Jembrigh 2014). Russian is partially mutually intelligible with Ukrainian, Rusyn and Belarusian. The idea is that the Kajkavian and Chakavian languages simply do not exist, though obviously they are both separate languages. Could you please explain what you mean by language and intelligibility and hopefully remedy this failure of the original text? Other factors that one has to keep in mind is recent (and not so recent, too) history and its linguistic implications on speakers for instance, Slovaks older that about 20 dont have much trouble understanding Czech because Czech was pretty intrusive if not dominant in official and intercommunal use in Czechoslovakia until its collapse. Writing in Chakavian started very early in the Middle Ages and began to slow down in the 1500s when writing in Kajkavian began to rise. We speak them too. The biggest Slavic language by far is Russian, which has 154 million native speakers and over 258 million speakers in total. The Serbo-Croatian vocabulary in both Macedonian and Torlakian is very similar, stemming from the political changes of 1912; whereas these words have changed more in Bulgarian. Some famous linguists who are acquaintances of mine (they have Wikipedia pages) told me that they thought that 90% was a good metric. 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 difference is because Bulgarian is not spoken the same way it is written like Serbo-Croatian is. most speakers of one language find it relatively easy to achieve some degree of understanding in the related language(s). One of the most bizarre cases is that of Bulgarian, where the level of mutual intelligibility with spoken Czech is very low (close to zero), due to a completely different grammar. Scots and English are considered mutually intelligible. @AJ Traditionally, dialects are regional variations of one main language. Not true about Czech / Slovak inteligibility. A Moravian Czech speaker (Eastern Czech) and a Bratislavan Slovak (Western Slovak) speaker understand each other very well. Reading a Bulgarian text is not like reading an ordinary book in Czech, it would cost my brain much more kilojoules (but maybe mainly due to the monotonous Cyrilic script), but it is possible. They exist, but not in such a degree to render them unintelligible. Anti-Ethnic Sentiments Much like Nordic languages. If you're a foreign student, studying russian, it's unlikely you'd be able to understand Ukrainian at all. Croatian language doesnt exists. Also how much of Rusyn do Russians understand on a % basis? Only nationalists and fanatics disagree. I have friends from Bulgaria and I can tell you that they have problems by understanding some things. .Interestingly, Ukrainians can understand the Russian language better than the Russians would understand the Ukrainian. 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. Serbian is a macrolanguage made up to two languages: Shtokavian Serbian and Torlak or Gorlak Serbian. This is not necessarily correct in terms of vocabulary, but you will find a lot in common in the grammatical rules . Also cyrillic in Macedonian is almost as same as Serbian, but many Croats dont know or dont want to know cyrillic, and that makes Macedonian more different to them than to Serbs. For example, all Russian shows get subtitles on Ukrainian TV. Sorry I can`t give you percentage. Mutual intelligibility between languages can make learning them much easier. I can illustrate it on the video posted above Vojnata vo Bosna. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9 The reason there are subtitles on Russian-language shows in Ukraine is because of Ukraines puristic state language policies. IOW, I think there are two languages Czech and Slovak and I do not agree that they are the same language with two dialects. In addition, a Net search was done of forums where speakers of Slavic languages were discussing how much of other Slavic languages they understand. Nevertheless, writing continues in various Kajkavian dialects which still retain some connection to the old literary language, although some of the lexicon and grammar are going out (Jembrigh 2014).