While the two share a similar grammar system and some vocabulary words, . http://ifaq.wap.org/society/voweldeployment.html. Ekavian Chakavian has two branches Buzet and Northern Chakavian. https://www.academia.edu/4080349/Mutual_Intelligibility_of_Languages_in_the_Slavic_Family Saris Slovak has 85% intelligibility of Polish. Sorry for so much criticism it is just my Czech/Moravian opinion on the subject. In Ukrainian, one might say "I am waiting for you" ; however, there is no need for a conjunction in . French has 89% lexical similarity with Italian, 80% similarity with Sardinian (spoken on the Italian island of Sardinia), 78% similarity with Romansh (spoken in parts of Switzerland) and 75% similarity with Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. In this week's Slavic languages comparison we talk about animals in Polish and Ukrainian. Reactions: So far there have been few reactions to the paper. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? I have to really focus and try hard to understand them but with patience I can get buy. Italian is partially mutually intelligible with French, Catalan, Sardinian, Spanish, Ladin and Romanian. . 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). Serbs did not have the same language contact with the Macedonian language as Macedonians with Serbocroatian did. In brief, there is some mutual intelligibility, enough to have a simple conversation of the 'me Tarzan - you Jane' type, speakin. In this case, another criteria I would also consider is how hard or easy it is for a Serb to start understanding Macedonian. Ukrainian is a lineal descendant of the colloquial language used in Kievan Rus (10th-13th century). Of course, the interviews are subtitled in Macedonian, but even an untrained ear and eye can see how similar these languages are. Kajkavian is probably closer to Slovenian than it is to Chakavian. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? Regarding Polish and Russian there are many words with opposite meaning. Also I have a long article coming up as a chapter in a peer reviewed book being published out of Turkey. 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. 5 (2): 135146. For instance, akavian Croatian is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. There is as much Czech literature and media as Slovak literature and media in Slovakia, and many Slovaks study at Czech universities. However, Russian is only 74% mutually intelligible with spoken Belarusian and 50% mutually intelligible with spoken Ukrainian. What is the basis on which your Serbian friend said that? Bolgarian 30 % spoken, 50 % written 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%). You are probably talking about the study Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages? 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). However, many of these dialects are at least partially mutually intelligible. Serbian is a macrolanguage made up to two languages: Shtokavian Serbian and Torlak or Gorlak Serbian. But thats politics for you. Intelligibility between languages can be asymmetric, with speakers of one understanding more of the other than speakers of the other understanding the first. Good post, OP. I understood perfectly him, but not her. It is not a failure. My parents (and naturally me when I was child) make a lot of mistakes in the word cases and it means that they are (for the speakers from more west Serbian and also Croatian region) the lower social group, that they are not educated enough or that they are unread, and why dont Macedonians in their native language too, especially in ex Yugoslavia. 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. Poles who know German and Old Polish can understand Silesian quite well due to the Germanisms and the presence of many older Polish words, but Poles who speak only Polish have a hard time with Silesian. Slovenians have a very hard time understanding Poles and Czechs and vice versa. Slovenian while it sounds slavic to me is not intelligible at all save for a few words here and there. How mutually intelligible are Czech and polish? | Latin D Vedle hlavn, pouvan v Bulharsku, existuje jet makedonsk norma, kter tak (?) Even the basic words are almost the same. I dismiss some of the wilder conspiracy stuff out of hand. In terms of pronunciation, Ukrainian or Southeastern Yiddish can be considered to occupy an intermediate position between Northeastern and Central Yiddish. Macedonian and Bulgarian would be much closer together except that in recent years, Macedonian has been heavily influenced by Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian has been heavily influenced by Russian. Score: 4.1/5 (74 votes) . This is great. Ukranian: 20% https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58Aog4AJdQM. & relat.)) Between some languages, there can also be imbalanced mutual intelligibility, known as asymmetric intelligibility. This occurs when speakers of one language can understand a related language to a greater degree than speakers of the related language can understand the other. plenty of prepositions are used in a similar, if not identical, manner; to name an example, na is used in both Macedonian and Ni Torlak as a replacement for the Serbian genitive, in addition to its standard use as on(to) Its often said that Czechs and Poles can understand each other, but this is not so. Mutual intelligibility among Slavic Languages | Antimoon Forum Im gonna estimate 40% for Bulgarian, cant really say what the difference between written and spoken Bulgarian would be for me. 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. Have every heard of Dubrovnik dialect? 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. How Similar Are Russian And Ukrainian? - Babbel Magazine Map; Russia's Periphery* Baltic States. Upper Dnistrian is influenced by German and Polish. Belic) maybe do not understand Macedonian so well as Macedonian the Serbian language do (because of the according to you Bilingual learning . Could you please explain what you mean by language and intelligibility and hopefully remedy this failure of the original text? By the way, osnovnata (osnovna-ta) is related to the Czech word osnova (basis, outline). Is there an agreed-upon standard? non-Shtokavian dialects: Kajkavian, Chakavian and Torlakian) diverge more significantly from all four normative varieties. Although different writing systems are used, there are many similarities in the grammar used, such as Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian. A lect called iarija Slovenian is spoken on the Istrian Peninsula in Slovenia just north of Croatia. I think the OP exagerated a bit. Background Information - Department of Slavic, East European - UCLA CZECH: Bulharsk jazyk je indoevropsk jazyk ze skupiny jihoslovanskch jazyk. And, as it was already sad, all Slovaks understand czeh better than czech slovaks thanks to hostory and politics. Furthermore, there is a dialect continuum between Kajkavian and Chakavian as there is between Kajkavian and Slovenian, and lects with a dialect continuum between them are always separate languages. Hello can I use your comments in a paper I am writing? Polish Dialects In a Nutshell: Everything About the Main Polish Accents mutuamente compreensvel - Traduo em ingls - exemplos portugus Hence the figures are averages taken from statements by native speakers of the languages in question. 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 think that Russian has at least 89% with Belorussian, because I understand all speech in Belorusian. 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. My email is on the Contact page. It has many Hungarian words, archaic Slavic words and words of an unknown origin (at least to me). Around year 550 Slovenians went west and Macedonians/Bulgars went south. ", "English in Scotland a phonological approach", "Mutual Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages within the Romance language family", "How Konkani Won the Battle for 'Languagehood', "Algumas observaes sobre a noo de lngua portuguesa", Romanian language Britannica Online Encyclopedia, "UCLA Language Materials Project: Language Profile", "Uzbek | the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies", "Soviet Dungan nationalism: a few comments on their origin and language", "The Linguistic Characteristic Of Esan Language: Towards Its Empowerment and Development", "Mutual intelligibility of spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic, and Tunisian Arabic functionally tested: A pilot study", "Gdzie "sicz", a gdzie "porohy"?! 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. Therefore . 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 written languages differ much more than the spoken ones. This difference is because Bulgarian is not spoken the same way it is written like Serbo-Croatian is. Is Ukrainian more like . 40% of Silesian vocabulary is different from Polish, mostly Germanisms. Mutual intelligibility between languages can make learning them much easier. But they would learn it quickly if they cared. Can Ukrainians and Polish understand each other? They have more in common than you might think! As a Polish native speaker I used to be sure that Czech and Polish are mutually intelligible until I met Czech couple. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world. Polish Ukrainian Mutually Intelligible? Languages Comparison ago. Czech and Slovak are simply dialects of this one tongue. This implies that some of the high intelligibility between Slovak and Polish may be due to bilingual learning on the part of Slovaks. I could try. Personal communication. pouv cyrilici, a bantsk norma, kter pouv latinku. 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. 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 recent years, many of the German words are falling out of use and being replaced by Polish words, especially by young people. 12 Dec 2016 #221. 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). He printed out the paper and showed it to his colleagues at the next meeting, and they spent some time discussing it. A Serbian friend of mine was estaunished to see how some Macedonian celebrities speak Serbian on the TV without accent. German is partially mutually intelligible with Yiddish and Dutch. If, for example, one language is related to another but has simplified its grammar, the speakers of the original language may understand the simplified language, but less vice versa. 0%? Polish and Ukrainian have higher lexical similarity at 72%, and Ukrainian intelligibility of Polish is ~50%+. In Linguistics, this MI stuff is noncontroversial. In Czech rep. Slovaks dont have to pass any language exams (the other foreigner do have to). The Chinese language, on the other hand, is comprised of a number of dialects that arent always mutually intelligible. Or when I heard the word pobrzajte (hurry up (plural)) it was very interesting to me. As a native Serbian speaker from Bosnia who has interacted with most Slavic languages , heres my breakdown of level of mutual intelligibility with other Slavic tongues: its not based on bilingual learning. The intelligibility of Belarussian with both Ukrainian and Russian is a source of controversy. (j/k) 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). Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian Mutual Intelligibility - UniLang But when you see it, you are shocked that you can read it. And the same problem emerges in other situations. Its a nasty drug, and I hear its addicting. What Are Mutually Intelligible Languages? Many Poles insist that Silesian is a Polish dialect, but this is based more on politics than reality. However, in terms of vocabulary Ukrainian is closer to Polish, from which it has borrowed a large number of words. It's also highly intelligible with Portuguese in writing, though less so when spoken. Serbia is large and you should also ask Serbians in other regions. [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. BULGARIAN (transferred to the Latin script): algarskijat ezik e indoevropejski ezik ot grupata na junoslavjanskite ezici. Mutual intelligibility mostly applies to the educated, standardized forms of these languages, not to the various sub-standard dialects. 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. Nobody Ive ever talked to that lived in Serbia had anything other than [u] for //. Bosnian and Montenegrin are also just dialects of Serbian language. Thanks for clearing this up! Speaking of myself, after calculating everything, I can understand to specific degree Slovene, somewhat Slovak/Russian, Serbo-Croatian std without problems and also Macedonians. There are many differences between Bulgarian and Russian speakers. He said he is frequent visitor in Poland and therefore he speaks Polish. (Download). Ukrainian language similar to Polish? - page 8 Mutual intelligibility between languages - CourseFinders Macedonian and Bulgarian are fairly similar but they are not close to being fully mutually intelligible. Ponaszymu appears to lack full intelligibility with Czech. Anti-Ethnic Sentiments The results: Slovenian: 20% Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family. How much Slovene can your average Chakavian speaker understand? For example we chakavians use a lot of words used in Polish, Ukrainian, Slovak etc but in standard Croatian those words are described as archaisms and instead words used in tokavian come from Turkish. What Languages Are Mutually Intelligible With Serbian? This understanding can be in spoken or written communication. Russian. Because of all of this, tokavian speaker has a hard time understanding fast talking akavian speakers. On the one hand, Belarussian has some dialects that are intelligible with some dialects of both Russian and Ukrainian. a person with Virgin ears from any where in the Czech republic and west and central Slovakia will understand each other fairly well. akavian differs from the other nearby Slavic lects spoken in the country due to the presence of many Italian words. I can barely understand czech (slovak I havent tried) and, as similar as it is to croatian, I can only understand a little slovenian. Those 12% in Polish are very dubious as well. Can you give me your name here or can you email me with your name, unless that is you in your email address there. Ni Torlak has six vowels the standard /a e i o u/ and a reduced schwa // thats found where a strong yer once used to be, as in dog and sadness (this vowel has merged with /a/ in Serbian, but the two yers were kept as separate reflexes /e o/ (merging with those full vowels) in Macedonian) with phonemic and morpho-lexical stress that has plenty of grammatically conditioned shifts. Yet we speak of Kai/Cha as of Serbo-Croatian dialects, while Slovenian is totally foreign. 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. A Slovenian person that has never lived in the east of the country understands only about 60 70 % of the dialect (Prekmurski dialect). Even little kids who watch the show understand. 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). Slobozhan Russian can also be called Kuban Russian or Balachka. . The British Academy funded research project dedicated to examining mutual intelligibility between Karakalpak, Kazakh and Uzbek languages is currently under way at the, This page was last edited on 6 February 2023, at 16:40. Then she talks about the cards in the bags, I again understand everything, but at 0:47, another stream of unintelligible sounds is starting. This phenomenon is called asymmetrical mutual intelligibility. 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. To some extent, Russian, Rusyn, Ukrainian, and Belarusian retain a degree of mutual intelligibility. Intelligibility testing between East and West Slovak would seem to be in order. The claim for separate languages is based more on politics than on linguistic science. Polish, Ukrainian and even Serbo-Croatian dialects are less so, especially in the light of their geographical spread . but they are often mutually intelligible. How mutually intelligible are Slavic languages? : r/linguistics - reddit Here are three critical ways in which Bulgarian and Russian speakers differ. However, Balachka is dying out and is now spoken only by a few old people. 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. Its historical development consists of four main periods. But then it is difficult. It is sometimes used as an important criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used. However, my girlfriend never ever says these words and rather uses on and ona just like in Serbian. The revelation comes from General Musharrafs memoir, In the Line of Fire, which begins serialisation in The Times today and will further embarrass the White House at a time when relations between the US and Pakistan are already strained.. Pakistani intelligence chiefs are concerned that General Musharraf may jeopardise their relationship with British intelligence agencies after claiming that a convicted terrorist was once an MI6 informer. 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). His level of understanding might be 90%, or 82%, 85%. However, Dutch speakers usually understand more German than the reverse because they study German in school. Some famous linguists who are acquaintances of mine (they have Wikipedia pages) told me that they thought that 90% was a good metric. Conclusion: Interesting article but I think there are some minor and some major mistakes and misunderstandigs. Spanish is also partially mutually intelligible with Italian, Sardinian and French, with respective lexical similarities of 82%, 76% and 75%. 25/01/23 | StarsInsider. There is much nonsense said about the mutual intelligibility of the various languages in the Slavic family. This makes Polish a much much easier language to learn than Russian. Because so many Slavic languages are national languages, they tend to have pretty big populations. 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). An individual's achievement of moderate proficiency or understanding in a language (called L2) other than their first language (L1) typically requires considerable time and effort through study and practical application if the two languages are not very closely related. 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! Robert Lindsay. I am not saying this to slam Ukrainians, but just an observation. 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. It has also been described as a transitional dialect between Polish and Slovak. 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 the army, fairly precise understanding of the meaning of the commands is required and it worked, without any formal language training. Russian has a decent intelligibility with Bulgarian, possibly on the order of 50%, but Bulgarian intelligibility of Russian seems lower. Serbians and Bosnians not so such. For example, the varieties of Chinese are often considered a single language even though there is usually no mutual intelligibility between geographically separated varieties. Polish and Ukrainian have higher lexical similarity at 72%, and Ukrainian intelligibility of Polish is ~50%+. Kids speak both languages, as well as English, fluently. I have no problems understanding the Torlakian dialect. PDF Mutual Intelligibility Among the Slavic Languages The Macedonian spoken near the Serbian border is heavily influenced by Serbo-Croatian and is quite a bit different from the Macedonian spoken towards the center of Macedonia. She doesn't speak any Polish so it's going to be an interesting challenge. Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family - Academia.edu Foreign languages arent always as foreign as youd expect. 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. 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. Understanding the connection between mutually intelligible languages, can make it easier to learn an additional language. Mezentseva, Inna. Belarusian is closer to Polish and Ukrainian than Russian. Most of the Ukrainian speakers who do not speak Russian are in Canada at the moment. Save. Russian, Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian materials are available. Intelligibility in the Slavic languages of the Balkans is much exaggerated. Ukrainian and Russian only have 60% lexical similarity. The Serbo-Croatian vocabulary in both Macedonian and Torlakian is very similar, stemming from the political changes of 1912; whereas these words have changed more in Bulgarian. There is one factor they dont know about the internet. 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. Or as an English speaker, you might catch the gist of some Scots. Russian speakers are also likely to understand some Bulgarian, along with other Slavic languages to a lesser extent. I am a native Spanish speaker but my girlfriend is Macedonian. Not only are these Slavic languages very similar to Russian in written form, but they are also around 70% mutually intelligible. The latter is heavily mixed with Shtokavian. Ukrainian has 82% intelligibility of Belarusian and Rusyn and 55% of Polish. 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. Bulgarian and Macedonian can understand each other to a great degree (65-80%) but not completely. Most pairs have no figure for written intelligibility. Im Czech . Basically, you only hear a series of consonants with hardly recognizable vowels. A professor of Slavic Linguistics at a university in Bulgaria reviewed the paper and felt that the percentages were accurate. The overall lexical similarity between Spanish and Portuguese is estimated to be 89%. 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. So you believe the 9/11 narrative? In 1933, reforms were forced that streamlined Ukrainian more in line with the Russian language. 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). About the mistakes So give these mutually intelligible languages a second look. Are ukrainian and russian mutually understandable? I will also say that it is a fact that a British intelligence linked terrorist Anas al-Liby recruited by MI6 to kill Gadaffi in 96 was involved in the African Embassy bombings.