When Kievan Rus' fell to the Mongols in the 13th century, the formerly united states became split, and what were once very closely-related dialects began to . KajkavianCroatian, spoken in northwest Croatia and similar to Slovenian, is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. He printed out the paper and showed it to his colleagues at the next meeting, and they spent some time discussing it. Now tokavian and akavian. 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. can take anywhere. Czechs claim only 10-15% intelligibility of Polish. These three languages have an 86% lexical similarity; that is, they share 86% of the same words. I think it was mostly due to a learning few high frequency Polish words that are difficult for a Russian native speaker to understand. It is time to stop believing to the politically motivated propaganda about our languages and start telling the truth. Interesting article . The Polish langauge uses the Latin script, while the Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic. There are new scientific figures for Czech-Slovak, Czech-Serbo-Croatian and Czech-Bulgarian. I can randomly pick up another paragraph from that Wikipedia page, and it would be harder: You are a smart guy. [5][6] In a similar vein, some claim that mutual intelligibility is, ideally at least, the primary criterion separating languages from dialects.[7]. Linguistic distance is the name for the concept of calculating a measurement for how different languages are from one another. For instance, he and she in Standard Macedonia is toj and taa respectively, very close to Bulgarian toy and tya. Balgarski is balgarskijat, grupa is grupata, oficialni is oficijalnijat etc. Although Chakavian is clearly a separate language from Shtokavian Croatian, in Croatia it is said that there is only one Croatian language, and that is Shtokavian Croatian. Czech and Slovak are more intelligible to me then Slovenian with Slovak more so then Czech. I can only speak from my personal experience (business trips to Czech Republic - Ostrava, Praha, Mlad Boleslav, Mikulov ). Nevertheless, Bulgarian-Russian intelligibility seems much exaggerated. I also have no problems understanding standard Croatian or the Kajkavian and Cakavian Croatian dialects and Bosnian and Montenegrin to me are the same language and completely understandable. Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family. 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. Apart lack of understandability there are phrases that could be ill understood with famous Polish I am looking for the broom 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? Routledge. . Get 70% off + 10 languages + 14 day free trial. Maltese. The diffete. The only big one i disagree with your breakdown is serbian/croatian vs bulgarian. Borg, Albert J.; Azzopardi-Alexander, Marie (1997). Toj e oficialnijat ezik na Republika Balgarija i edin iz 23-te oficialni ezika na Evropejskija sajuz. Its often said that all Slavic languages are mutually intelligible with each other. Spoken Slovenian is a surprise too its phonology has a significant German influence. Tunisian Arabic is also considered mutually intelligible with Maltese, particularly with regards to idiomatic expressions. But in the case of written Russian, you could elevate this number up to 70-80% quite easily. 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. Ukrainians and Belarusians understand each other's languages with no problem. Intelligibility testing between East and West Slovak would seem to be in order. 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. It has been massively updated with a lot of new research from controlled scientific intelligibility studies. I got that figure from a Serb. But despite similarities in grammar and vocabulary and almost identical alphabets, they differ sharply in many ways and are not mutually intelligible. Serbs until recently where still self titled Yugoslavs. Silesian, which can be heard in the southwest (sometimes also considered a separate language). How to explain that? Kashubian itself is a macrolanguage made up of two different languages, South Kashubian and North Kashubian, as the two have difficult intelligibility. The Answer, and Examples for 8 World Languages. 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). We speak in our own, or we speak locally. Not sure where did you get more similarity between Boyko dialects and Russian language? 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. However, Chakavian magazines are published even today (Jembrigh 2014). Both me and her had a much easier time following the Rusyn dialects than standard Ukrainian (although they were by no means completely comprehensible). Paul McGrane. Is there any particular method to determine this? All Rights Reserved. Mutual intelligibility mostly applies to the educated, standardized forms of these languages, not to the various sub-standard dialects. Western Ukraine, at least urban Western Ukraine, no longer speaks the Galician dialect but rather standard Ukrainian. But when you see it, you are shocked that you can read it. I am afraid you are not right because if you take Serbian dialects till Nis, then they are very mutually intelligible with Macedonian! I do hope that you understand the point. Nevertheless, most Bulgarians over the age of 30-35 understand Russian well since studying Russian was mandatory under Communism. Or when I heard the word pobrzajte (hurry up (plural)) it was very interesting to me. If I had to name a Slavic language worst for intelligibility, it would absolutely and positively have to be Bulgarian its phonetics are completely foreign (to the extent that sometimes in the back of my mind I think that it sounds barbarian and Turkish), as is its grammar (the vocabulary, however, is not, being probably 90% similar to Russian, making written Bulgarian pretty easy). Czech-Slovak is now 91%, Czech-Serbo-Croatian is 18%, Czech-Macedonian is 17% and Czech=-Bulgarian is 13%. It was for me a bit strange, because Bulgarian science still supports the thesis that Macedonian is Bulgarian. Finally, I think the Ukrainians' mentality if more Polish, while the Russian mentality is more fourteenth century Mongol. 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 . & relat.)) The historical development is characterized by four main periods. If you choose to learn a language which is at least to some extent mutually intelligible to a language you already know . Not only are these Slavic languages very similar to Russian in written form, but they are also around 70% mutually intelligible. What is the most mutually intelligible Slavic language? But still Slovene and Dalmatian akavian speaker can talk if they stick to old slavic part of their respective languages. Some famous linguists who are acquaintances of mine (they have Wikipedia pages) told me that they thought that 90% was a good metric. The overall lexical similarity between Spanish and Portuguese is estimated to be 89%. Finally, understanding mutual intelligibility gives you helpful insight into the history of a language. Regarding Polish and Russian there are many words with opposite meaning. Nared s osnovnata, izpolzovana v Balgarija, saestvuvat oe makedonska norma, kojato sao izpolzva kirilica, i banatska norma, kojata izpolzva latinica. CZECH: Bulharsk jazyk je indoevropsk jazyk ze skupiny jihoslovanskch jazyk. Kajkavian, especially the ZagorjeKajkaviandialect around Zagreb, is close to theStajerskadialect of Slovene. As a result, I, who spoke fluent Ukrainian when I moved from Ukraine 18 years ago, have problems following modern speech on TV. I confess to not being a linguist, and therefore didnt see past the problematic sentence NATO EU. Saris Slovak has 85% intelligibility of Polish. Personally, I must admit that Serbs from areas above Nis (cf. IOW, I think there are two languages Czech and Slovak and I do not agree that they are the same language with two dialects. Sign languages are independent of spoken languages and follow their own paths of development. http://www.izviestija.info/izviestija/, I was born in Canada to a Serbian family and speak Serbian so I am a good control as I was never formally educated in Serbian and its grammar. This makes Polish a much much easier language to learn than Russian. Kajkavski it seems has changed less than akavski. 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. Im Slovenian, my mother tongue is Slovenian, however I have also learnt Serbo-Croatian from a very early age. 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! 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. Also how much of Rusyn do Russians understand on a % basis? Mezentseva, Inna. According to a paper on Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family (link in comments): Native Belarusian speakers can understand 80% of spoken Ukrainian and 80% of written . 5 (2): 135146. He is currently listed on the FBIs Most Wanted Terrorists list. Or they will say, Well, that is about 70% our language. If it is a dialect, they will say, That is really still our language. This comment is fantastic! I am a good control for this because I am an American but my father is Slovak(my mother is half Slovak but American) and I can understand about 50 % of Slovak and I do have a hard time with Czech but once I get past their hacek r I can understand quite a bit. A lect called iarija Slovenian is spoken on the Istrian Peninsula in Slovenia just north of Croatia. How can you mesure intelligibility by using one single person. 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). A Serbian friend of mine was estaunished to see how some Macedonian celebrities speak Serbian on the TV without accent. The Polish and Ukrainian languages come from the same Slavic roots, but are not so close that they are mutually intelligible. | 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. In the former Czechoslovakia, everything was 50-50 bilingual media, literature, etc. The German influence is more prominent in the west; Polish influence is greater in the east. Russian. She didnt have any problem following. Only nationalists and fanatics disagree. Croatian-Shtokavian is only a dialect of Serbian language. Jembrigh, Mario. Chakavian has a low mutual intelligibility with either, in part due to its large number of loanwords from Venetian. These recommendations are based on research into the mutual intelligibility of Germanic languages, conducted by Femke Swarte. This is simply not the case. Between sources, you might find some claiming that two languages are mutually intelligible, while other sources claim those same languages arent. Your English is pretty much ok. Un- or fortunately, you are right about the thesis about Macedonian and Bulgarian. A different dialect is spoken in each town. 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 . Not only that, but it is not even fully intelligible with the Eastern Slovak that it resembles most. If you take your 25 (supposedly from Novi Sad) and 90 from Nis, then we come to about 60 percent (from Serbian side). So dominant, in fact, that parts of Ukraine and Belarus were significantly russified in a matter of a generation, even if not completely. 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. 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. Some comments on Ukrainian: Thanks so much for this post. Je to oficiln jazyk v Bulharsk republice a jeden z 23 oficilnch jazyk v Evropsk unii. 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. Your email address will not be published. 70%? Only Croatians try so hard to press differences. Recently a Croatian linguist forwarded a proposal to formally recognize Chakavian as a separate language, but the famous Croatian Slavicist Radoslav Katii argued with him about this and rejected the proposal on political, not linguistic grounds. People from Lviv and larger cities and towns in western Ukraine have a slight clipped accent but they speak standard Ukrainian. So you are a speaker of Southern Chakavian, right? I have friends from Bulgaria and I can tell you that they have problems by understanding some things. 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. 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. Torlakians are often said to speak Bulgarian, but this is not exactly the case. This phenomenon is called asymmetrical mutual intelligibility. 1. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? 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. http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/sheikhmedia.htm In Ukrainian, one might say "I am waiting for you" ; however, there is no need for a conjunction in . I guess this would not have worked for Macedonian and Slovene in the Yugoslav army. 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 Chakavian actually has a written heritage, but it was mostly written down long ago. It is quite true that Macedonian speakers (even today) are switching to Serbian (although there is a resistence among some speakers of Macdonian) on informal situations. Interesting when one considers that Ukrainians do not even consider Rusyn a real language. It forms a single tongue and is not several separate languages as many insist. Written intelligibility is higher at 25%. Some say it is a part of Czech, but more likely it is a part of Polish like Silesian. Hence, many religious books were imported from Russia, and these books influenced Bulgarian. adrian. Yes and if you could more than one listener, it would be great. 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. Bulgarian is similar to Macedonian but with more different cyrillic. The written languages differ much more than the spoken ones. I simply didnt know what for example word iskati (to seek) means when I first watched that movie, I was 14, I understand it from the context like I can understand Macedonian. Ukrainian and Belarusian are the closest languages, as together with Russian they form the East Slavic group of languages. Serbo-Croatian has only 20% intelligibility of Ukrainian. Some reports say there is difficult intelligibility between Ekavian Chakavian in the north and Ikavian Chakavian in the far south, but speakers of Labin Ekavian in the far north say they can understand the Southeastern Istrian speech of the southern islands very well (Jembrigh 2014). That barrier, however, is not too difficult to overcome. Look at this Polish girl: The real reason that Slavs cant even understand each other: not enough vowels in their tongues! For example, those who learn Ukrainian will eventually know 70% of Polish lexicon and a . Although different writing systems are used, there are many similarities in the grammar used, such as Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian. More properly, their speech is best seen as closer to Macedonian than to Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian. It's also highly intelligible with Portuguese in writing, though less so when spoken. In Serbian word order is not that important like it is in English. I think that Russian has at least 89% with Belorussian, because I understand all speech in Belorusian. However, the Croatian macrolanguage has strange lects that Standard Croatian (tokavian) cannot understand. 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. 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). A Serb gave me this information. I have to really focus and try hard to understand them but with patience I can get buy. 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. I myself who have learned some Macedonian, pick up much more words from spoken Serbo-Croatian than spoken Bulgarian. Older people who rembember federation understand everything. I would be able to translate what he says! Pannonian Rusyn lacks full intelligibility of Rusyn proper. Test only Serbs who know almost no English (they exist in older generation). 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. Yet, it is closer to Russian that standard Ukrainian. French has a reasonable degree of lexical similarity with Italian,Sardinian, Romansh, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish, making it partially mutually intelligible with these languages. That is ~90% our language. Russian, the native language of 160 million people, including many . This term is similar to linguistic distance in that it can reflect how similar or different languages are. In this case, another criteria I would also consider is how hard or easy it is for a Serb to start understanding Macedonian. non-Shtokavian dialects: Kajkavian, Chakavian and Torlakian) diverge more significantly from all four normative varieties. Their mutual intelligibility varies greatly, between the dialects themselves, with Shtokavian, and with other languages. His level of understanding might be 90%, or 82%, 85%. Polish uses Latin letters, just like English. Russian: 15% spoken, 25% written I am not saying this to slam Ukrainians, but just an observation. The old Dniestrian/Galician speech is largely confined to rural areas. demonstratives (tk~ovd vs. tuka~ovde, tamo vs. tamu) and some elementary adverbs (sg vs. sega now; jutre vs. utre tomorrow; dns(ke) ~ deneska today, fera vs. vera yesterday) are fairly similar; Ni Torlak uses multiple sets of demonstratives as its 3rd person pronouns (toj/ta/to/ti/te/ta, onj/on/on/on/on/on, ovj/ov/ov/ov/ov/ov, in descending order of frequency) as opposed to Serbians almost exclusive use of on/ona/ono/oni/one/ona and standard Macedonians use of toj/taa/toa/tie 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. The Lemko dialect of Rusyn has only marginal intelligibility with Ukrainian. Civis Illustris. There are some dialects around Buzet that seem to be the remains of old Kajkavian-Chakavian transitional dialects (Jembrigh 2014). Id like to know about written mutual intelligibility, because, about spoken mutual intelligibility, there are people from portugal that cannot understand brazilians and vice-versa, though they speak the same language. 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. 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. Russian. 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. Comment * document.getElementById("comment").setAttribute( "id", "ac933fc62d348b183dfc4516edf000ec" );document.getElementById("b83dbe3da2").setAttribute( "id", "comment" ); document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. That is a particularly ugly version of nationalism brewing in your vicinity. In recent years, many of the German words are falling out of use and being replaced by Polish words, especially by young people. English professor. 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. Mutual intelligibility is highly subjective. Slovak has 91% intelligibility of Czech. Mutual intelligibility with varieties of Serbo-Croatian is hindered by differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, Kajkavian being the most mutually intelligible. 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. My gues. From a grammatical and morphological perspective, Ukrainian is closer to Russian: they both have East Slavic roots. Often the two languages are genetically related, and they are likely to be similar to each other in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, or other features. Even the most common, most simple words sound alien in spoken Bulgarian, VODA(WATER) is pronounced ,VODA . Ukrainians can understand Russian much better than the other way around. 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. Was he educated? But despite similarities in grammar and vocabulary and almost identical alphabets, they differ sharply in many ways and are not mutually intelligible. The truth is that a person can often understand other dialects, except his native one. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in writing. I once had a conversation with a young woman from the Czech Republic. Re: Cz/Slo About Slovak being two different unintelligible languages I highly doubt so. However, a Croatian linguist has helped me write part of the Croatian section, and he felt that at least that part of the paper was accurate. General. However, any suggestions that Kajkavian is a separate language are censored on Croatian TV (Jembrigh 2014). About the mistakes This is the first time that this has been done using just . 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. 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). However, Dutch speakers usually understand more German than the reverse because they study German in school. What language is closest to Polish? 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. Rural variations are usually less mutually intelligible. What percentage of Ukraine speaks Polish? If speakers of one language have more exposure to its related language, theyre likely to pick up more of that language. Ukranian: 20% Ukrainian and Russian only have 60% lexical similarity. He said he is frequent visitor in Poland and therefore he speaks Polish. For the south slavic speakers, it is a commonism, almost a joke, for a Serb and a Croat to argue---in a mutually intelligible language---that . Other then that difference is in grammar and accent. Italian is partially mutually intelligible with French, Catalan, Sardinian, Spanish, Ladin and Romanian. Ive watched that movie on a croatian television with the croatian subtitle and understood that movie much much better, though Croatian also has a little differences. > Much of the claimed intelligibility was simply bilingual learning. And Shtokavian is dialect of Serbian language. Yes you can. A Serbian native speaker felt that the percentages for South Slavic seemed to be accurate. JohnUK. In my experience, its quite easy. Russian influence only ended in 1878. 10%? According to former Pakistani President Musharraf Omar Sheikh who wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta was recruited during the 90s by British intelligence. Yiddish speakers usually have an easier time understanding German than vice versa, largely because Yiddish has added words from other languages, including Hebrew and Slavic languages, which makes it more difficult for German speakers to understand. Bolgarian 30 % spoken, 50 % written 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.
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