How come you have not done a post about 9/11 before Robert? Complicating the picture is the fact that many Ukrainians are bilingual and speak Russian also. 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. Kajkavian is a dialect of Slovenian language. Mutual intelligibility between languages can make learning them much easier. Glad to hear you are steering clear of it. I think the OP exagerated a bit. 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. It is very strange when some words are not understood, although the communication is possible. Intelligibility in the Slavic languages of the Balkans is much exaggerated. Not true about Czech / Slovak inteligibility. Heres his interview with Bosnian figures, and Bosnian is part of B/H/S landscape Interesting when one considers that Ukrainians do not even consider Rusyn a real language. That is ~90% our language. It is also said that West Slovak (Bratislava) cannot understand East Slovak, so Slovak may actually two different languages, but this is controversial. Serbo-Croatian has variable intelligibility of Macedonian, averaging ~55%, while Nis Serbians have ~90% intelligibility with Macedonian. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world. But even they will know the literary norm of their own language which will ease up the communication. Not only that, but it is not even fully intelligible with the Eastern Slovak that it resembles most. I am afraid you are not right because if you take Serbian dialects till Nis, then they are very mutually intelligible with Macedonian! People who live in border regions have an advantage of speaking two languages and can easily comprehand other ones as well. 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. It is an official language of the Bulgarian republic and one of 23 official languages of the European Union. I speak both Southern akavian and neotokavian. The Mutually Intelligible Languages of 8 Popular World Languages, What You Should Know About Mutually Intelligible Languages, The 11 Best Language Learning Apps of 2023, How to Say Thank You in 35 Different Languages Around the Globe, The Penny Pinchers Guide to Learning Any Language for Free, The Top 8 What Language Should I Learn Online Quizzes, The 6 Best Sources of Language Learning Videos on the Internet. For instance, in 1932, Ukrainian g was eliminated from the alphabet in order to make Ukrainian h correspond perfectly with Russian g. After 1991, the g returned to Ukrainian. They understand almost nothing. Western Slovak speakers say Eastern Slovak sounds idiotic and ridiculous, and some words are different, but other than that, they can basically understand it. Polish 5 % spoken, 20 % written So I understood 100% But I admit that it was a relatively very easy text. However, many groups of languages are partly mutually intelligible, i.e. 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. In recent years, many of the German words are falling out of use and being replaced by Polish words, especially by young people. 5. A Slovenian person that has never lived in the east of the country understands only about 60 70 % of the dialect (Prekmurski dialect). The German influence is more prominent in the west; Polish influence is greater in the east. Masovian, which is spoken throughout the central and eastern regions of Poland. Spanish and Catalan have a lexical similarity of 85%. Western Ukraine, at least urban Western Ukraine, no longer speaks the Galician dialect but rather standard Ukrainian. Linguistic distance is the name for the concept of calculating a measurement for how different languages are from one another. It depends which dialect. Reactions: So far there have been few reactions to the paper. 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. 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). A different dialect is spoken in each town. It is not true that Shtokavian which I speak is not mutually intelligible with Torlakian of southern Serbia. For me having learnt some Slavic languages and watching Bulgarian TV was not very difficult. 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. The more the better. It is estimated that there is 89% lexical similarity with French, 87% similarity with Catalan (spoken in Southern Spain), 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 78% with Ladin (spoken in Northern Italy) and 77% with Romanian. #5. However, many of these dialects are at least partially mutually intelligible. A prima example of this is Russian where the 5% intelligibility could be pretty accurate in the case of a regular communication, because Russians have a very strong intonation, and they simply dont pronounce vowels properly. Serbs until recently where still self titled Yugoslavs. This makes Polish a much much easier language to learn than Russian. The thesis that Bulgarian and Macedonian are the same language is not real in the practice. 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. Pannonian Rusyn is actually a part of Slovak, and Rusyn proper is really a part of Ukrainian. 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). Most pairs have no figure for written intelligibility. A question: how is it decided that the cut-off between a language and dialect is 90% MI? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-YqET96OO0&fs=1&hl=en_GB]. A Serbian native speaker felt that the percentages for South Slavic seemed to be accurate. Croatian (Stokavski): 98% I am a native Spanish speaker but my girlfriend is Macedonian. In Ukrainian, one might say "I am waiting for you" ; however, there is no need for a conjunction in . 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. For Kai-Cha it was less shocking as many words were taught by their parents (or they remembered them from childhood, before the school system forces you to use only the Std Cro). Mutually Intelligible And Different. But other results that included Czech and Bulgarian were very poor. We speak in our own, or we speak locally. Macedonian I can understand better, and Im going to say that my comprehension of it used to lie somewhere between 90 and 95%, and Im going to cite 98% for my present knowledge theres a lot of technical vocabulary that takes a while to grasp, and a few words that I cant make sense of no matter how hard I try, but most of the differences are more marginal than between standard Serbian and Macedonian: Sledva da se otbelei, e tova delene e uslovno i imenata ne otrazjavat razlini ezici, a samo periodi v razvitieto na balgarskija ezik, za koito se otkrivat charakterni belezi. In this week's Slavic languages comparison, we talk about animals in Polish and Ukrainian. Cheers brothers and sisters! Ukrainian and Russian only have 60% lexical similarity. There are distinct regional variations of Arabic. I will also send you a copy so you can look over the Serbo-Croatian part and tell me if there are any errors. Often the two languages are genetically related, and they are likely to be similar to each other in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, or other features. 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. How many English speakers know Serbo-Croatian? Yet we speak of Kai/Cha as of Serbo-Croatian dialects, while Slovenian is totally foreign. It forms a single tongue and is not several separate languages as many insist. the use of the accusative is nearly identical in Ni Torlak and Kumanovo Macedonian (cannot say the same for standard Macedonian as it has no accusative to begin with) and is, in general, more of an oblique case than anything else I do hope that you understand the point. [2] As a consequence, spoken mutual intelligibility is not reciprocal. And Shtokavian is dialect of Serbian language. . 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. This is simply not the case. BR, Interesting article but I think there are some minor and some major mistakes and misunderstandigs. Answer (1 of 11): Look, if you're Ukrainian you most likely already speak russian. Not everyone within each of the three broad dialect areas speaks Yiddish in the same way -- there are sub-dialects, but they are mutually intelligible. I myself who have learned some Macedonian, pick up much more words from spoken Serbo-Croatian than spoken Bulgarian. Serbs did not have the same language contact with the Macedonian language as Macedonians with Serbocroatian did. wovel a shifts to o not shits hahhaha sorry. Ponaszymu also has many Germanisms which have been falling out of use lately, replaced by their Czech equivalents. When I was first exposed to spoken BCS, the most significant issue was their prosody, because the vocabulary and the grammar presented very little difficulty for me as a Ukrainian/Russian bilingual. At least not in general if so, it might depend on the school. Ekavian Chakavian has two branches Buzet and Northern Chakavian. Ive been following this page and kept coming to it for the past months, actually more than a year (and have noticed some updates). During the last 20 years, Ukraine has tried to make the language norm as far from Russian as possible for nationalistic reasons. 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. Bosnian and Montenegrin are also just dialects of Serbian language. 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. 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. True science would involve scientific intelligibility testing of Slavic language pairs. Student Authored Website. Complaints have been made that many of these percentages were simply wild guesses with no science behind them. Download: How is it possible if they speak the same language? Serbia is large and you should also ask Serbians in other regions. Hello Mr Lindsay, It features phonemic vowel length that came about as a coalescence of a vowel with a following /v/ (usually one /v x j/ in Serbian, the distribution is opaque and unpredictable) or the contraction of the sequence /ij/ into /i:/ this feature is shared with plenty of Macedonian dialects, as far as I remember but has traditional, harder Serbian alveopalatals and palatals, having [t d t d] for Macedonian [t d c() ()] (treating these as allophones as they seem to be the same four phonemes). Hence the figures are averages taken from statements by native speakers of the languages in question. Tradues em contexto de "mutuamente compreensvel" en portugus-ingls da Reverso Context : Os membros da equipa de verificao da Comisso podem comunicar com as autoridades e com o pessoal do operador da instalao numa lngua comum e mutuamente compreensvel. Polish has 22% intelligibility of Silesian, 12% of Czech, 6% of Russian, and 5% of Bulgarian. Serbo-Croatian intelligibility of Slovenian is 25-30%. The results show that in most cases, a division between West and South Slavic languages does exist and that West . 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. Ukrainians and Belarusians understand each other's languages with no problem. Serbs/Croats used to live in the south Poland and they moved south to the current location. "The Linguistic Innovation Emerging From Rohingya Refugees." Accent is on last or penultimate syllable. Finally, I think the Ukrainians' mentality if more Polish, while the Russian mentality is more fourteenth century Mongol. Its often said that all Slavic languages are mutually intelligible with each other. However, she is from Skopje, close to the Serbian border and which have had much more influence from Serbian. Italian is partially mutually intelligible with French, Catalan, Sardinian, Spanish, Ladin and Romanian. A professor of Slavic Linguistics at a university in Bulgaria reviewed the paper and felt that the percentages were accurate. Do you speak Ukrainian. Polish: 5% Southern Slovak on the Hungarian border has a harder time understanding Polish because they do not hear it much. All foreign movies in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia are translated into Czech, not Slovak. Macedonian has 65% oral and written intelligibility of Bulgarian. Eastern Slovak has ~80% intelligibility of Rusyn. Torlakians are often said to speak Bulgarian, but this is not exactly the case. I was surprised that they never live in Slovenia and they never learn Slovenian. Belarussian almost completely comprehensible, except a few words. Or maybe you are just a gatekeeper. By the way, osnovnata (osnovna-ta) is related to the Czech word osnova (basis, outline). It is just a dialect in east Slovakia that westernd Slovaks (and Czechs) find harder to understand but it is not like they would not understand a word. BULGARIAN: Balgarskijat ezik e naj-rannijat pismeno dokumentiran slavjanski ezik. & relat.)) This is not the case, as all figures were derived from estimates by native speakers themselves, often a number of estimates averaged together. most speakers of one language find it relatively easy to achieve some degree of understanding in the related language(s). I cannot understand that much of kajkavski nor akavski, but I can understand more akavski than I can kajkavski. Intelligibility among languages can vary between individuals or groups within a language population according to their knowledge of various registers and vocabulary in their own language, their exposure to additional related languages, their interest in or familiarity with other cultures, the domain of discussion, psycho-cognitive traits, the mode of language used (written vs. oral), and other factors. Much of the claimed intelligibility between Czech and Slovak was simply bilingual learning. They are essentially speaking the same language. If you can speak Russian fluently, you will be able to understand 77% of Polish words, while Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, and . Torlak Serbian is spoken in the south and southwest of Serbia and is transitional to Macedonian. Save. 1. While the two share a similar grammar system and some vocabulary words, . Portuguese also has a high degree of mutual intelligibility with Spanish. 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). German is partially mutually intelligible with Yiddish and Dutch. Ukrainian pronounces the "o" as "o" whereas Russians pronounce it typically as an "a." The Ukrainian "" and "" have different pronunciations compared to their Russian equivalents, "" and "". Jembrigh, Mario. Polish and Ukrainian have higher lexical similarity at 72%, and Ukrainian intelligibility of Polish is ~50%+. 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 (I will come to Bulgarian too). "Proto-Slavonic,". [1] Advanced speakers of a second language typically aim for intelligibility, especially in situations where they work in their second language and the necessity of being understood is high. Answer (1 of 4): Yes. Its vocabulary and grammar has enough similarities for Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians to understand each other well, whereas Russians understand only will recognise separate words. http://ifaq.wap.org/society/voweldeployment.html. Russian has a decent intelligibility with Bulgarian, possibly on the order of 50%, but Bulgarian intelligibility of Russian seems lower. There is as much Czech literature and media as Slovak literature and media in Slovakia, and many Slovaks study at Czech universities. I will tell you also this: Is Ukrainian more like . The person did not understand everything what I wrote. Belarussian is nonetheless a separate language from both Ukrainian and Russian. 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. Have every heard of Dubrovnik dialect? PS More than half of Slovenian seems to be closely related to Kaikavian and Chakavian Croatian (and probably Old Shtokavian which is almost extinct). 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). Czech has 82% intelligibility of Slovak (varies from 70-95%), 12% of Polish and 5% of Russian and Bulgarian. akavian differs from the other nearby Slavic lects spoken in the country due to the presence of many Italian words. Mutual intelligibility is highly subjective. Maltese. In writing, German is also somewhat mutually intelligible with Dutch. Between sources, you might find some claiming that two languages are mutually intelligible, while other sources claim those same languages arent. but what if person is from island and speaks heavy akavian and tokavian speaker is real tokavian like from Slavonia (North Eastern Croatia). He said if he was there for about a week he could understand probably everything. Only nationalists and fanatics disagree. 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). the copula is mostly the same (sm/si/e/smo/ste/su vs. sum/si/e/sme/ste/se) Written intelligibility is higher at 25%. Still others (for example, Voegelin and Voegelin 1977) recognize just two main dialect groups: Eastern and Western Ukrainian. How can you mesure intelligibility by using one single person. 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. 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. Speaking of myself, after calculating everything, I can understand to specific degree Slovene, somewhat Slovak/Russian, Serbo-Croatian std without problems and also Macedonians. When we do intelligiblity studies, we look for virgin ears or people who have not heard the other language much or at all. 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. Many people know cases well but simply dont want to speak them correctly in conversation with someone who doesnt speak them correctly because that makes them feel like they want to judge other people who doesnt use cases correctly or that makes them more educated, even more smart, than someone who doesnt use it, and that makes both sides uncomfortable. The intelligibility of Belarussian with both Ukrainian and Russian is a source of controversy. 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. Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). No there is not. Molise Croatian is a Croatian language spoken in a few towns in Italy, such as Acquaviva Collecroce and two other towns. But the end of the sentence clarified these words. There are some words that we don't understand, but in general, these languages are much closer to each other than the pairs Russian-Ukrainian and Russian-Belarusian. Its often said that Czechs and Poles can understand each other, but this is not so. How this is measured varies, but mutual intelligibility and vocabulary overlap, and often play a role in these calculations. My guest from Ukraine will have to guess 6 animals that I'll describe to her in Polish. Vitebsk, Belarus. 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! I am a native Macedonian and I totally dont agree with you. In Czech rep. Slovaks dont have to pass any language exams (the other foreigner do have to). When you find out it is a separate language, you ask for %, and they often tell you! 0%? Kids speak both languages, as well as English, fluently. However, Russian is only 74% mutually intelligible with spoken Belarusian and 50% mutually intelligible with spoken Ukrainian. 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. Russian only has 60% intelligibility of Balachka. It differs from the rest of Silesian in that it has undergone heavy Czech influence. We speak them too. And the 25% is very low. 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. Slobozhan Ukrainian speakers in this region find it easier to understand their Russian neighbors than the Upper DnistrianUkrainian spoken in the far west in the countryside around Lviv. The Polish langauge uses the Latin script, while the Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic. Far Northeastern Slovak (Saris Slovak) near the Polish border is close to Polish and Ukrainian. Additionally, Norwegian assimilated a considerable amount of Danish vocabulary as well as traditional Danish expressions. 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 . This is not necessarily correct in terms of vocabulary, but you will find a lot in common in the grammatical rules . Therefore, for the moment, there are five separate Croatian languages: Shtokavian Croatian, Kajkavian Croatian, Chakavian Croatian, Molise Croatian, and Burgenland Croatian. I just didnt realize that when you talked about learning the other language you were actually referring to the errors inherent in doing a non-virgin ears MI study, and not conflating language learning with mutual intelligibility. Thank you very much for this. Thats why in the Czechoslovak army the rule was: speak your own language, understand both. This is simply reality in Serbia today. Hutsul, Lemko, Boiko speech (small Ukrainian/Rusyn dialects) stangely enough, more comprehensible than standard Ukrainian. Polish uses Latin letters, just like English. Their mutual intelligibility varies greatly, between the dialects themselves, with Shtokavian, and with other languages. Its spelling, however, is quite different from any of them. Slovenians, Macedonians and Bulgars used to be one nation called Sklaveni and they were living in the south Hungary. Cieszyn Silesian speakers strongly reject the notion that they speak the same language as Upper Silesians. Re: Rus/Ukr . The more German the Silesian dialect is, the harder it is for Poles to understand. 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. I use Ethnologues list of languages and dialects, but extend it a bit. It is more like the other slavic languages (v instead of u, z instead of s, itd, less vowels, and no distinction between and ). http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9 "A New Methodology for Romance Classification". As soon as one gets even a very moderate amount of exposure, comprehension improves, even between such geographically distant languages as Polish and Serbian I remember staying in Montenegro and a Pole buying bread and a Montenegrin could still communicate with each other speaking at a slow-enough pace. I once had a conversation with a young woman from the Czech Republic. Regarding Polish and Russian there are many words with opposite meaning. Balgarskijat ezik e pluricentrien ezik ima njakolko kniovni normi. If you choose to learn a language which is at least to some extent mutually intelligible to a language you already know . 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. 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? The standard view among linguists seems to be that Lach is a part of Czech. With this, off I go to sleep. However, Dutch speakers usually understand more German than the reverse because they study German in school. The differences to me are like New England English versus English in the deep South versus Australian. If the central varieties die out and only the varieties at both ends survive, they may then be reclassified as two languages, even though no actual language change has occurred during the time of the loss of the central varieties. Im gonna estimate 40% for Bulgarian, cant really say what the difference between written and spoken Bulgarian would be for me. I can illustrate it on the video posted above Vojnata vo Bosna. Slobozhan Russian is very close to Ukrainian, closer to Ukrainian than it is to Russian, and Slobozhan Ukrainian is very close to Russian, closer to Russian than to Ukrainian. Northern Germanic languages spoken in Scandinavia form a dialect continuum where two furthermost dialects have almost no mutual intelligibility.