So give these mutually intelligible languages a second look. It shows that Macedonians indeed grew up to certain extent as bilingual Macedonian-Serbian. Why not look em up on his site. When we do intelligiblity studies, we look for virgin ears or people who have not heard the other language much or at all. Download: Sorry for so much criticism it is just my Czech/Moravian opinion on the subject. 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: So, when you're learning the Polish alphabet, all you have to pay attention to are the special accents and the pronunciation. 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. Are Russian and Polish mutually intelligible? The historical development is characterized by four main periods. However, Balachka is dying out and is now spoken only by a few old people. Rusyn ~ Ukrainian . BULGARIAN: Balgarskijat ezik e naj-rannijat pismeno dokumentiran slavjanski ezik. The main Turkologist I worked with on that chapter told me that he thought 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. Macedonian side, the situation is more complicated (i will explain later). There is one factor they dont know about the internet. . French has a reasonable degree of lexical similarity with Italian,Sardinian, Romansh, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish, making it partially mutually intelligible with these languages. Torlakians are often said to speak Bulgarian, but this is not exactly the case. Czech: 10% Serbians and Bosnians not so such. Young Czechs and Slovaks talk to each other a lot via the Internet. How do they arrive at these estimates? Ekavian Chakavian has two branches Buzet and Northern Chakavian. Their mutual intelligibility varies greatly, between the dialects themselves, with Shtokavian, and with other languages. And Shtokavian is dialect of Serbian language. It is no surprise that Ukrainian (and to a smaller extent) Belarusian have tons of Polish words, and are therefore more lexically similar to Polish than to Russian. I can randomly pick up another paragraph from that Wikipedia page, and it would be harder: cheers I tested this on my wife by showing her news clips on Youtube. Is the virgin Intelligibility important? I am really sorry, but if you are speaking about science, you cannot just say. The Bulgarian language is the earliest written record Slavic language. .Interestingly, Ukrainians can understand the Russian language better than the Russians would understand the Ukrainian. I would like to know if anyone could confirm that you could indeed . Most Macedonians already are able to speak Serbo-Croatian well. For me having learnt some Slavic languages and watching Bulgarian TV was not very difficult. Since then, Slovak has been disappearing from the Czech Republic, so the younger people dont understand Slovak so well. Grammar, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. Yet, it is closer to Russian that standard Ukrainian. The languages really split about 1,000 years ago, but written Slovak was based on written Czech, and there was a lot of interlingual communication. They understand almost nothing. Mutual Intelligibility among the Slavic Languages by Robert Lindsay The mutual intelligibility (MI) of the languages of the Slavic family is an interesting topic because many are mutually intelligible to one degree or another. The Polish and Ukrainian languages come from the same Slavic roots, but are not so close that they are mutually intelligible. Regular speech is generally quite fast. But when you see it, you are shocked that you can read it. No idea, but if they are fairly intelligent as she sounds like she is, you might be shocked at how she might be able to rattle off some estimated figures like that. Polish: Ukrainian and Belarusian (both partially; moreover, . For instance, West Palesian is a transitional Belarussian dialect to Ukrainian. [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]. Then she asked me to go do something useful, so this is all I can contribute with. Salute from Czech republic. 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. However, Bulgarians claim to be able to understand Serbo-Croatian better than the other way around. Was he from Belgrade or Novi Sad or Nis? Mutually Intelligible And Different. Lets say a young Czech goes to Slovakia without prior exposure to Slovak. https://www.academia.edu/4080349/Mutual_Intelligibility_of_Languages_in_the_Slavic_Family Personally, I must admit that Serbs from areas above Nis (cf. 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. Everything else we chalk up to bilingual learning as we call it and we do not think it is accurate. Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian have 10-15% oral intelligibility, however, there are Bulgarian dialects that are transitional with Torlak Serbian. It seems polish and bulgarian are the easiest for me to understand (save for bosnian, serbian, and crnogorski). Kids speak both languages, as well as English, fluently. It is difficult to get a high-paying job that requires skill and . Molise Croatian is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. For example, Dutch speakers tend to find it easier to understand Afrikaans than vice versa as a result of Afrikaans' simplified grammar. On the other side, i.e. Despite a lot of commonality between the dialects, the differences between them are significant. With this, off I go to sleep. Spanish and Catalan have a lexical similarity of 85%. What sort of Slav nation are you a part of my friend? [2] As a consequence, spoken mutual intelligibility is not reciprocal. The main Shtokavian dialects of Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian are mutually intelligible. Ukrainian and Belarusian are pretty much mutually intelligible (source: I am a poet in Belarusian, I go to poetry festivals in Belarus quite often and there are no interpreters for the Ukrainian poets invited to international events). Jembrigh, Mario. (j/k) Czech and Slovak are more intelligible to me then Slovenian with Slovak more so then Czech. non-Shtokavian dialects: Kajkavian, Chakavian and Torlakian) diverge more significantly from all four normative varieties. The biggest Slavic language by far is Russian, which has 154 million native speakers and over 258 million speakers in total. Jeff Lindsay estimates that Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). 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. This is also true of vocabulary and other aspects. In other words, Ukrainian speakers can often understand Russian, while Russian speaker doesn't understand Ukrainian, especially Russian speakers from outside Ukraine. The Mutually Intelligible Languages of 8 Popular World Languages 1. 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. In fact, people in the north of Poland regard Silesian as incomprehensible. Can you give me your name here or can you email me with your name, unless that is you in your email address there. 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. Polish has 22% intelligibility of Silesian, 12% of Czech, 6% of Russian, and 5% of Bulgarian. I myself who have learned some Macedonian, pick up much more words from spoken Serbo-Croatian than spoken Bulgarian. Interesting article Ukrainian has 62% lexical similarity with Russian but 70% with Polish, which isn't high enough for mutual intelligibility with both Russian and Polish, but Poles can certainly understand Ukrainian much better than Russian, and Russians can understand Ukrainian much better than Poles. The Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family is known for its languages being relatively closely related. Once you pick up those basic 50 words, understanding Macedonian becomes super easy that was my experience with Macedonian friends (the few of them who dont speak Serbian). 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). You would be amazed at how good peoples estimates of this sort of thing are though. Are Russian and Polish mutually intelligible? 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 . 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. I have friends from Bulgaria and I can tell you that they have problems by understanding some things. 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. . > Much of the claimed intelligibility was simply bilingual learning. 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. Robert does look at these stories. While not usually considered mutually intelligible, theres also enough similarity between French and Italian that speakers of Portuguese may understand both of these languages. Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). Serbo-Croatian dialects in relation to Slovene, Macedonian, and Bulgarian: The non-standard vernacular dialects of Serbo-Croatian (i.e. 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. When it is relatively symmetric, it is characterized as "mutual". I thought this is Croatia! However, in recent years, there has also been quite a bit of bilingual learning. This makes Polish a much much easier language to learn than Russian. All foreign movies in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia are translated into Czech, not Slovak. Reactions: So far there have been few reactions to the paper. London Times, 25 September 2006 . This term is similar to linguistic distance in that it can reflect how similar or different languages are. 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. A koine is currently under development. The translation is not very problematic. a person with Virgin ears from any where in the Czech republic and west and central Slovakia will understand each other fairly well. Kajkavian, especially the ZagorjeKajkaviandialect around Zagreb, is close to theStajerskadialect of Slovene. Serbians often say radiu and its very similar to Croatian raditi u or radit u, but sometimes Serbians say ja u da radim or even u da radim without ja (I), because u is first singular form of the verb hteti and ja is needless, but its very rare and common for southern Serbian dialects and also very very irregular in official Serbian, but that is very similar to official Macedonian. Its also said that Serbo-Croatian can understand Bulgarian and Macedonian, but this is not true. But the language isnt problem. Its historical development consists of four main periods. But then it is difficult. 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. More? So you believe the 9/11 narrative? Im Slovenian, my mother tongue is Slovenian, however I have also learnt Serbo-Croatian from a very early age. The Croatians left Croatia and came to Italy from 1400-1500. Nared s osnovnata, izpolzovana v Balgarija, saestvuvat oe makedonska norma, kojato sao izpolzva kirilica, i banatska norma, kojata izpolzva latinica. Complicating the picture is the fact that many Ukrainians are bilingual and speak Russian also. Of course, the interviews are subtitled in Macedonian, but even an untrained ear and eye can see how similar these languages are. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world. But then the second older guy from Bosnia (Filipovi) appeared on the screen and wow! Balgarskijat ezik e pluricentrien ezik ima njakolko kniovni normi. The intelligibility of Czech and Slovak is much exaggerated. 5 (2): 135146. 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. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9 So I understood 100% But I admit that it was a relatively very easy text. These recommendations are based on research into the mutual intelligibility of Germanic languages, conducted by Femke Swarte. but the two languages are more different than some people think. Yes and if you could more than one listener, it would be great. For true MI testing, we want virgin ears, and it has to be both ways. Lesser Polish, which can be heard in the south and southeast. Bulgarian: 15% spoken , 30-40% written There are some dialects around Buzet that seem to be the remains of old Kajkavian-Chakavian transitional dialects (Jembrigh 2014). This comment is fantastic! 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. 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. Get 70% off + 10 languages + 14 day free trial. Portuguese has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with Spanish, Galician, French and Italian. Personal communication. After all, you can look at the study that I listed above and check the results of the written translation task (translation of 50 individual words), which illustrates the similarity of lexicons: Czechs best understand Slovak words (96,52%), then Polish (64,29%), then Bulgarian (57,00%), Croatian (55,38%) and Slovene (49,73%). The Czech law even states that Slovak language can be used in schools and in official documents. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in writing. Jen. Slovenians, Macedonians and Bulgars used to be one nation called Sklaveni and they were living in the south Hungary. They give you strict % figures, and it is pretty amazing. (. Czechs are more urbane. 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. 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. 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. So they speak Macedonian to me and I speak Serbian to them, and we understand each other perfectly. A Serbian native speaker felt that the percentages for South Slavic seemed to be accurate. Many Turkic languages are mutually intelligible to a higher or lower degree, but thorough empirical research is needed to establish the exact levels and patterns of mutual intelligibility between the languages of this linguistic family. Polish and Ukrainian have higher lexical similarity at 72%, and Ukrainian intelligibility of Polish is ~50%+. 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. 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. Russian 20 % spoken, 30 % written Many Ukrainian-speakers consider the language . Russian is partially mutually intelligible with Ukrainian, Rusyn and Belarusian. 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. Do you speak Ukrainian. There was a lot of past Yugoslav politics that hid the truth. Most people in the region speak Russian with a few Ukrainian words. Slovak: 20% Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? Polish is a disgusting sounding language. Thanks for the information about Eastern Slovak I will incorporate it. 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 . According to former Pakistani President Musharraf Omar Sheikh who wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta was recruited during the 90s by British intelligence. People observing conversation between Cieszyn Silesian and Upper Silesian report that they have a hard time understanding each other. 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. Also how much of Rusyn do Russians understand on a % basis? Do you speak Boyko or Hutsul? Later I found out that Slovenian and Bulgarian/Macedonian are all south Slavic languages while Serbian language is actually a western Slavic language like Slovak/Czech/Polish. Intelligibility testing between East and West Slovak would seem to be in order. You cannot simply separate the articles from the words during a regular conversation. During the last 20 years, Ukraine has tried to make the language norm as far from Russian as possible for nationalistic reasons. However, in terms of vocabulary Ukrainian is closer to Polish, from which it has borrowed a large number of words. Nobody Ive ever talked to that lived in Serbia had anything other than [u] for //. Serbia is large and you should also ask Serbians in other regions. December 2014. 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. An inherent pure inherent intelligibility test would involve a a speaker of Slavic lect A listening to a tape or video of a speaker of Slavic Lect A. Score: 4.1/5 (68 votes) . Its mainly in the weird Bulgarian grammar! Belarussian almost completely comprehensible, except a few words. Or maybe you are just a gatekeeper. If you choose to learn a language which is at least to some extent mutually intelligible to a language you already know . That information is in error. Not only that, but it is not even fully intelligible with the Eastern Slovak that it resembles most. But even they will know the literary norm of their own language which will ease up the communication. Can Ukrainians and Polish understand each other? Some islanders go even further than that and don`t consider themselves ethnic Croats. Another similar example would be varieties of Arabic, which additionally share a single prestige variety in Modern Standard Arabic. 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. In contrast, there is often significant intelligibility between different Scandinavian languages, but as each of them has its own standard form, they are classified as separate languages. In this week's Slavic languages comparison, we talk about animals in Polish and Ukrainian. Also, danes and swedes have a hard time understanding each other, but they can read the others language quite well. The reason there are subtitles on Russian-language shows in Ukraine is because of Ukraines puristic state language policies. Thanks for clearing this up! Yet its totally foreign to many in Croatia. The grammars of sign languages do not usually resemble those of spoken languages used in the same geographical area; in fact, in terms of syntax, ASL shares more with spoken Japanese than it does with English. Czechs claim only 10-15% intelligibility of Polish. Southern Slovak on the Hungarian border has a harder time understanding Polish because they do not hear it much. Ja u raditi, for me, sounds more Croatian and Bosnian or at least archaic, and Serbians from Bosnia and Croatia also speaks in that way. The main difference is in the ortography. Thanks so much for this post. 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). Answer (1 of 11): Look, if you're Ukrainian you most likely already speak russian. Is Russian and Polish Mutually Intelligible? Many Turkic languages are mutually intelligible to a higher or lower degree, but thorough empirical research is needed to establish the exact levels and patterns of mutual intelligibility between the languages of this linguistic family. It is not true that Shtokavian which I speak is not mutually intelligible with Torlakian of southern Serbia. Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family. If one takes the transitional dialects which make a triangle between Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, one can say that it is also one language. 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. The Lemko dialect of Rusyn has only marginal intelligibility with Ukrainian. Actually the way it is spoken sometimes sounds more like Slovak to me than Czech or polish does, however past really basic speech it is pretty hard to understand. . Russian. 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). Serbo-Croatian has only 20% intelligibility of Ukrainian. 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. Other then that difference is in grammar and accent. One way to look at Macedonian is that it is a Serbo-Croatian-Bulgarian transitional lect. This is a political point, of course. Ukrainian, and Belarusian. It is time to stop believing to the politically motivated propaganda about our languages and start telling the truth. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? Despite all of this, Ukrainian and Russian aren't the closest languages in the Slavic language family, and they're not even mutually intelligible. Slovenian language might be closer to the Macedonian/Bulgarian than to the Serbian language. 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. He gave me the 25% figure. Polish uses Latin letters, just like English. That being said, the line between a language and a dialect is often blurred. In recent years, many of the German words are falling out of use and being replaced by Polish words, especially by young people. My take on it is right here. 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. From some reason, the Hutsul, Lemko, andBoiko dialects of the Rusyn language are much more comprehensible to Russians than Standard Ukrainian is. 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). Belarusian is, in a sense, in between other slavic languages. 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. 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. Belarussian has 80% intelligibility of Ukrainian and 55% of Polish. 2023 Enux Education Limited. In addition, the Slobozhan dialects of Ukrainian and Russian such as (Slobozhan Ukrainian and Slobozhan Russian) spoken in Kantemirov (Voronezhskaya Oblast, Russia), and Kuban Russian or Balachka spoken in the Kuban area right over the eastern border of Ukraine are very close to each other. The problem is that native speakers can understand other speakers of their own language. Russian. A Serb gave me this information. Polish and Ukrainian mutual intelligibility question. How much Slovene can your average Chakavian speaker understand? Je to oficiln jazyk v Bulharsk republice a jeden z 23 oficilnch jazyk v Evropsk unii. Russian is followed by Polish with over 40 million speakers, Ukrainian with 33 million and Czech with 13 million. 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 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. It is not a failure. A western Slovak can even understand most of Ruthenians hen they are speaking. So, i've been interested about how much Polish speakers can understand Ukrainian without learning the language, but, most results i found said it's not really mutually intelligible, despite sharing alot or some words. Slow, deliberate speech is not typical. possession is indicated most frequently using dative pronouns, unlike Serbians tendency to use possessive pronouns in greater frequency [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-YqET96OO0&fs=1&hl=en_GB]. Or when I heard the word pobrzajte (hurry up (plural)) it was very interesting to me.