Russian influence only ended in 1878. Mutual intelligibility also occurs in a wide variety of degrees, ranging from none, to partial, to full mutual intelligibility. Mezentseva, Inna. These are 33 brand new symbols that you'd have . Bosnian and Montenegrin are also just dialects of Serbian language. 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. French has a reasonable degree of lexical similarity with Italian,Sardinian, Romansh, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish, making it partially mutually intelligible with these languages. For Macedonian without knowledge of other Slavic languages is also difficult to understand all the words which come from Russian and which are not current in Macedonian. Its mainly in the weird Bulgarian grammar! If you speak Russian, you might be surprised at how much Ukrainian you understand. 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 . The intelligibility of Czech and Slovak is much exaggerated. How can you mesure intelligibility by using one single person. Contents1 Can Slovenians understand Croatian?2 What languages are mutually intelligible with Croatian?3 What is the closest language to Slovenian?4 Which two . Re: Cz/Slo In addition, a Net search was done of forums where speakers of Slavic languages were discussing how much of other Slavic languages they understand. Slovenian while it sounds slavic to me is not intelligible at all save for a few words here and there. What I took as Czech speaking Czech language, which I perfectly understand, was actually Czech who tries to speaks Polish. My guest from Ukraine will have to guess 6 animals that I'll describe to her in Polish. In fact, some say the intelligibility between the two is near zero. The Bulgarian language is the earliest written record Slavic language. There is a group of Bulgarians living in Serbia in the areas of Bosilegrad and Dimitrovgrad who speak a Bulgarian-Serbian transitional dialect, and Serbs are able to understand these Bulgarians well. You must namely take into consideration that the mutual understanding depends on many things if you are LISTENING or READING, WHAT are people talking about, HOW FAST they are speaking, and even WHO is speaking. Im The Lizard King, I Can Do Anything! In contrast, Filipovi is talking slowly, and although some words have a different stress than in Czech, I can identify them pretty well and hence listening to this guy is basically like reading a written text in Serbo-Croatian. Additionally, some Arabic speakers may be familiar with Egyptian Arabic through the media, so they may rely on this to bridge any language gaps. It consists of at least four major dialects, Ekavian Chakavian, spoken on the Istrian Peninsula, Ikavian Chakavian, spoken in southwestern Istria, the islands of Bra, Hvar, Vis, Korula, and olta, the Peljeac Peninsula, the Dalmatian coast at Zadar, the outskirts of Split and inland at Gacka, Middle Chakavian, which is Ikavian-Ekavian transitional, and Ijekavian Chakavian, spoken at the far southern end of the Chakavian language area on Lastovo Island, Janjina on the Peljeac Peninsula, and Bigova in the far south near the border with Montenegro. Just search for alternative Croatian or kaikavian lessons and you will find me, along witht he contact information. If you're a foreign student, studying russian, it's unlikely you'd be able to understand Ukrainian at all. Kajkavian is a dialect of Slovenian language. Macedonian and Bulgarian are fairly similar but they are not close to being fully mutually intelligible. Around year 550 Slovenians went west and Macedonians/Bulgars went south. Please listen and watch the movie Zona Zamfirova. between Ni Torlak and Macedonian than between either of those two and Serbian Page 183 section 481. English professor. These figures were tallied up for each pair of languages to be tabulated and were then all averaged together. Other Western Slovak speakers (Bratislava) say that Eastern Slovak (Kosice) is hard to understand. Colloquial Ukrainian spoken in most of the country is pretty much comprehensible to Russians. Nevertheless, most Bulgarians over the age of 30-35 understand Russian well since studying Russian was mandatory under Communism. 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. . http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/sheikhmedia.htm The written languages differ much more than the spoken ones. I was surprised that they never live in Slovenia and they never learn Slovenian. I cant say that I would understand every word, but it is usually not difficult to guess some missing gaps from the context, so I could read professional books in Bulgarian in the past. And the same problem emerges in other situations. 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. In brief, there is some mutual intelligibility, enough to have a simple conversation of the 'me Tarzan - you Jane' type, speakin. That is a particularly ugly version of nationalism brewing in your vicinity. A number of native speakers of various Slavic lects were interviewed about mutual intelligibility, language/dialect confusion, the state of their language, its history and so on. I grew up as a Ukrainian speaker in North America. For example, the spirantisation of Slavic /g/ to /h/ is an areal feature shared by the Czech-Slovak group with both Ukrainian and Sorbian (but not with Polish). Mutual intelligibility with varieties of Serbo-Croatian is hindered by differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, Kajkavian being the most mutually intelligible. Hello everyone, But in the case of written Russian, you could elevate this number up to 70-80% quite easily. Chakavian actually has a written heritage, but it was mostly written down long ago. But reading a Bulgarian text is surprisingly easy, because the phonology and vocabulary are very similar. But other results that included Czech and Bulgarian were very poor. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? non-Shtokavian dialects: Kajkavian, Chakavian and Torlakian) diverge more significantly from all four normative varieties. In the army, fairly precise understanding of the meaning of the commands is required and it worked, without any formal language training. Paul McGrane. Intelligibility may be 85%. If youve studied one language, you may very well understand some of anotheror have a much easier time learning it. So you believe the 9/11 narrative? Re: Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian Mutual Intelligibility. Some simple words as Zboruva talk were not understood by a Bulgarian and I was obliged to use the word govori so that I adapted my Macedonian to get understood, although we seldom say govori. So I asked my Russian wife to listen to some of them (mostly local news on Youtube). Young czechs and slovaks communicate on internet on daily basis and they understand each other just perfectly. In the towns of Pirot and Vranje, it cannot be said that they speak Serbo-Croatian; instead they speak this Bulgarian-Serbo-Croatian mixed speech. 50% To some extent, Russian, Rusyn, Ukrainian, and Belarusian retain a degree of mutual intelligibility. That word have special meaning and I think that Serbian needs that word, but if I tell that word seriously while I speak, everybody will laugh at me. 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. This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you How much of Ukrainian can these Russians in Canada understand? 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). Serbo-Croatian has only 20% intelligibility of Ukrainian. However, Balachka is dying out and is now spoken only by a few old people. I would hazzard to say that Polish and Czech languages are at minimum 50% Intelligible and comprehensible between Poles and Czechs (when spoken with normal pace ) and at least 60-70% . Speaking of myself, after calculating everything, I can understand to specific degree Slovene, somewhat Slovak/Russian, Serbo-Croatian std without problems and also Macedonians. Bulgarian: 15% spoken , 30-40% written Anti-Ethnic Sentiments Belic) maybe do not understand Macedonian so well as Macedonian the Serbian language do (because of the according to you Bilingual learning . Save. However, Chakavian magazines are published even today (Jembrigh 2014). My father once read an article in polish and he said he understood almost everything, but when its spoken he said about 60%. Of course, the interviews are subtitled in Macedonian, but even an untrained ear and eye can see how similar these languages are. An example of equal treatment of Malaysian and Indonesian: the, List of dialects or varieties sometimes considered separate languages, List of languages sometimes considered varieties, North Germanic languages Mutual intelligibility, Learn how and when to remove this template message, considered separate languages only for political reasons, "Listening instruction and patient safety: Exploring medical English as a lingua franca (MELF) for nursing education", "The Contribution of Linguistic Factors to the Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages", "Taking taxonomy seriously in linguistics: Intelligibility as a criterion of demarcation between languages and dialects", "uvalar: The Internal Classification & Migration of Turkic Languages", "Mutual Comprehensibility of Written Afrikaans and Dutch: Symmetrical or Asymmetrical? 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. Like a shits to o. 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). Kajkavian is fairly uniform across its speech area, whereas Chakavian is more diverse (Jembrigh 2014). You cant honestly believe that 19 hijackers from Saudi Arabia armed only with boxcutters where able to attack US biggest most powerful landmarks given all the hard factual evidence not including things like thermite or if a missile hit the Pentagon or other junk like that. In my experience, its quite easy. But I can tell you this. I believe The Polish langauge uses the Latin script, while the Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic. To my opinion, Macedonian and Bulgarian would be today much closer if Macedonian had not been heavily influenced by Serbian and Bulgarian not influenced so much by Russian. In other cases, I had to rely on the context. Cheers brothers and sisters! Ja u da radim is more common to Serbian speakers but ja u raditi is officially more correct. Get 70% off + 10 languages + 14 day free trial. Ukranian: 20% Russian, the native language of 160 million people, including many . About the mistakes The only big one i disagree with your breakdown is serbian/croatian vs bulgarian. [2], Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible,[3] although there are also similarities among different sign languages. It is not really either Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian, but instead it is best said that they are speaking a mixed Bulgarian-Serbo-Croatian language. Slovenians, Macedonians and Bulgars used to be one nation called Sklaveni and they were living in the south Hungary. Hag_Boulder 9 mo. My email is on the Contact page. Slovak students do not have to pass a language test at Czech universities. Furthermore, not only does this app provide small lessons that can be expanded into full-on courses, but it also allows you to interact with native speakers of the target language. This comment is fantastic! Masovian, which is spoken throughout the central and eastern regions of Poland. Now tokavian and akavian. There is just a little problem to understand east Slovaks for Czechs from naywhere. Often the two languages are genetically related, and they are likely to be similar to each other in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, or other features. 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. 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. It has a very high degree of mutual intelligibility with Galician (spoken in Northwestern Spain), which is a language thats sort of a cross between Portuguese and Spanish. However Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are not like Czech and Slovak. Polish: 5% 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. In its written form Bulgarian is even more different than in its spoken form. Around 80% comprehension, it gets hard to talk about complex or technical things. Pure Silesian appears to be a dying language. I've ne. Cieszyn Silesian or Ponaszymu is a language closely related to Silesian spoken in Czechoslovakia in the far northeast of the country near the Polish and Slovak borders. 7. 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. Russia Invades Ukraine pt XII. 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. It has also been described as a transitional dialect between Polish and Slovak. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in . Much of the claimed intelligibility is simply bilingual learning. CZECH: Bulharsk jazyk je indoevropsk jazyk ze skupiny jihoslovanskch jazyk. Balgarski is balgarskijat, grupa is grupata, oficialni is oficijalnijat etc. #5. Interesting article but I think there are some minor and some major mistakes and misunderstandigs. Thank you very much for this. Bulgarian and Russian are close because the Ottoman rulers of Bulgaria would not allow printing in Bulgaria. In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. I can illustrate it on the video posted above Vojnata vo Bosna. I think it was mostly due to a learning few high frequency Polish words that are difficult for a Russian native speaker to understand. There was a lot of past Yugoslav politics that hid the truth. It should be noted that this division is conditional (actually: arbitrary) (and) names do not reflect the different languages, but only periods in the development of the Bulgarian language, which (have) detectable traits. No, you cannot. The fact that such process works is almost a definition of mutual intelligibility for me. You are a smart guy. If you know Polish, you're likely to understand a little Russian, Ukrainian and other Slavic languages, but this doesn't mean that the languages are mutually intelligible. Polish and Russian while Slavic sounding to my ear and is maybe 5%-15% intelligible . Im Czech . some things in this article are heavily exaggerated. Yet we speak of Kai/Cha as of Serbo-Croatian dialects, while Slovenian is totally foreign. 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. Russian is followed by Polish with over 40 million speakers, Ukrainian with 33 million and Czech with 13 million. As an addendum, Id like to make it known that my own grandmother, who hails from a village some twenty kilometers southwest of Ni, got lost in Belgrade once but has no problem getting around Skopje. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in writing. In the evening of the first day it reaches 93%, in a week 95%, all unsupervised, almost effortlessly, just by being there, watching, listening, talking and asking for an explanation here and there. 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. They exist, but not in such a degree to render them unintelligible. Three different methods were used: a word translation task, a cloze test and a picture task. Civis Illustris. .Interestingly, Ukrainians can understand the Russian language better than the Russians would understand the Ukrainian. akavian differs from the other nearby Slavic lects spoken in the country due to the presence of many Italian words. It is commonly believed that all Slavic languages are fully mutually intelligible, which implies that they are close Intelligibility between languages can be asymmetric, with speakers of one understanding more of the other than speakers of the other understanding the first. Can you give me your name here or can you email me with your name, unless that is you in your email address there. Macedonian: 50-60 % Vedle hlavn, pouvan v Bulharsku, existuje jet makedonsk norma, kter tak (?) Serbo-Croatian (Shtokavian) has 55% intelligibility of Macedonian (varies from 25-90%), 27% of Slovenian, 25% of Slovak, 20% of Ukrainian, 13% of oral Bulgarian and 25% of written Bulgarian, 10% of oral Russian and 22% of written Russian, 10% of Czech, and 5% of Polish. Is there an agreed-upon standard? Yes you can. In this case, another criteria I would also consider is how hard or easy it is for a Serb to start understanding Macedonian. Hence, Russians understand the colloquial Ukrainian spoken in the countryside pretty well, but they understand the modern standard heard on TV much less. Saris Slovak has 85% intelligibility of Polish. Is Ukrainian mutually intelligible with Polish? Ukrainian language, formerly called Ruthenian or Little Russian (now considered pejorative), Ukrainian Ukrans'ka mova, East Slavic language spoken in Ukraine and in Ukrainian communities in Kazakhstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and Slovakia and by smaller numbers elsewhere. Test only Serbs who know almost no English (they exist in older generation). Perhaps you would care to explain why the FBI has NOT charged Osama Bin Ladin with 9/11 but with the African Embassy bombings. However, you do say later in the text that 15), Part II", "Intelligibility of standard German and Low German to speakers of Dutch", "Cross-Border Intelligibility on the Intelligibility of Low German among Speakers of Danish and Dutch", "Mutual intelligibility of Dutch-German cognates by humans and computers", "Morpho-syntax of mutual intelligibility in the Turkic languages of Central Asia - Surrey Morphology Group", "Kirundi language, alphabet and pronunciation", "Tokelauan Language Information & Resources", "Majlis Bahasa Brunei Darussalam Indonesia Malaysia (MABBIM)", "Indonesian-Malay mutual intelligibility? Jeff Lindsay estimates that Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). Macedonian syntax and lexics are more similar to Serbian, even though structures of the language such as articles (no declensions) function as in Bulgarian. Do you speak Ukrainian. Serbs did not have the same language contact with the Macedonian language as Macedonians with Serbocroatian did. Despite all of this, Ukrainian and Russian aren't the closest languages in the Slavic language family, and they're not even mutually intelligible. In writing, however, Scots language looks similar to English (albeit with some spelling variations). 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. akavian is full of romanisms, kajkavian of germanisms and tokavian of turkish and other orientalisms. Email me and give me your name please and I will use you in the paper. 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. Both me and her had a much easier time following the Rusyn dialects than standard Ukrainian (although they were by no means completely comprehensible). . He printed out the paper and showed it to his colleagues at the next meeting, and they spent some time discussing it. Czech and Polish are incomprehensible to Serbo-Croatian speakers (Czech 10%, Polish 5%), but Serbo-Croatian has some limited comprehension of Slovak, on the order of 25%. Its historical development consists of four main periods. But then it is difficult. However, Russian is only 74% mutually intelligible with spoken Belarusian and 50% mutually intelligible with spoken Ukrainian. 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). Mutual intelligibility is highly subjective. I would be able to translate what he says! Serbs until recently where still self titled Yugoslavs. Then she talks about the cards in the bags, I again understand everything, but at 0:47, another stream of unintelligible sounds is starting. Good post, OP. Is Ukrainian closer to Russian or Polish? Many Poles insist that Silesian is a Polish dialect, but this is based more on politics than reality. most speakers of one language find it relatively easy to achieve some degree of understanding in the related language(s). Grammar, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. If we follow this line of reasoning, it would be correct to conclude that English is highly intelligible to Serbian speakers because most Serbs speak English. In this case, too, however, while mutual intelligibility between speakers of the distant remnant languages may be greatly constrained, it is likely not at the zero level of completely unrelated languages. For example the word najgolemata (the biggest) written in Serbian latin means najvea in Serbian, but I somehow know what golem/golema means, but when I hear this ta (definite article) in the end of the word, that sounds Macedonian to me more than golema, prefix naj (makes superlative form) is the same in Serbian. Accent is on last or penultimate syllable. Polish: Ukrainian and Belarusian (both partially; moreover, . The distance of Slovene may seem unlikely, but I think that it is still rather optimistic, because Czech and Slovene are quite distant, despite geographical closeness. . I speak Slovenian and Croats think that I can speak Kaikavian. Ukrainian much less comprehensible. 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. Russian has high intelligibility of Belarussian, on the order of 75%. I guess this would not have worked for Macedonian and Slovene in the Yugoslav army. Im pretty sure things are identical in Belarus, if not worse afaik knowledge of Belarusian there is not too widespread in the first place. Is Russian and Polish Mutually Intelligible? I have the hardest time to understand anything of Bulgarian, it sounds really fast and choppy but similar to Russian sometimes. It was formerly thought to be a Slovenian dialect, but some now think it is more properly a Kajkavian dialect. It is rather controversial outside Linguistics, as you run into nationalists and other fools who emotionally distort things. This is great. A professor of Slavic Linguistics at a university in Bulgaria reviewed the paper and felt that the percentages were accurate. "A New Methodology for Romance Classification". Bulgarian is a pluricentric language it has several literary norms. Very interesting. Answer (1 of 11): Look, if you're Ukrainian you most likely already speak russian. FluentU is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. I also recognize a Macedonian who speaks Serbian by the vowel e, and their sound of () is much softer than Serbian one, something between Serbian and or even as same as . I think this is very difficult for Macedonians to distinguish this two consonants and pronounce them correctly. For example, all Russian shows get subtitles on Ukrainian TV. . Glad to hear you are steering clear of it. 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. Due to no prior exposure to Russian, I could not understand that language, other than a few words and expressions here and there. Interesting when one considers that Ukrainians do not even consider Rusyn a real language. I have to really focus and try hard to understand them but with patience I can get buy. And o shifts to u. Some do in fact argue that Ukrainian shouldn't be considered as an East-Slavic language at all, being that it has more in common with West-Slavic languages such as Polish, Czech and Slovak than it . Intelligibility between Balachka and Ukrainian is not known. Yes and if you could more than one listener, it would be great. My take on it is right here. 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. Northern Germanic languages spoken in Scandinavia form a dialect continuum where two furthermost dialects have almost no mutual intelligibility. It all adds up, man. While not usually considered mutually intelligible, theres also enough similarity between French and Italian that speakers of Portuguese may understand both of these languages. Because so many Slavic languages are national languages, they tend to have pretty big populations. The intelligibility of Belarussian with both Ukrainian and Russian is a source of controversy. Ukrainian 15 % spoken, 25 % written And when islanders respond back in akavian they are puzzled: What? Intelligibility is more than 90% = dialect, less than 90% = language. German is partially mutually intelligible with Yiddish and Dutch. The reason Macedonian appears not very intelligible to a Serbian speaker is because many basic words (be, do, this, that, where, etc) are completely different, however most of the rest of the vocabulary is similar or the same. It shows that Macedonians indeed grew up to certain extent as bilingual Macedonian-Serbian. A Serb gave me this information. Funny thing when Slovene tourists come to Dalmatian islands they start to speak awkward Serbo Croatian they learned long ago in yugo schools because they fear of not being understood. The more German the Silesian dialect is, the harder it is for Poles to understand. 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. If you speak Russian, it will be easier for you to understand other Slavic languages, which include Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene. FluentU brings a language to life with real-world videos. Pretty accurate I think. . Also akavian has some elements of its own. Linguistic distance is the relative degree of difference between languages or dialects.