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. It is true that Czech is more urban and less folk and many Slovaks study in Czech republic. 6. Are Russian and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? - Quora In fact, people in the north of Poland regard Silesian as incomprehensible. Yet we speak of Kai/Cha as of Serbo-Croatian dialects, while Slovenian is totally foreign. Russian is partially mutually intelligible with Ukrainian, Rusyn and Belarusian. Ukrainian is a lineal descendant of the colloquial language used in Kievan Rus (10th-13th century). For instance, Portuguese and Spanish have a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility, but theyre technically separate languages. A different dialect is spoken in each town. My gues. Serbo-Croatian and Russian have 10-15% intelligibility, if that, yet written intelligibility is higher at 25%. Russian on the other hand uses the Cyrillic alphabet. What Language Is The Closest To Polish? (A Look At 7 - AutoLingual How many English speakers know Serbo-Croatian? 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. Ponaszymu appears to lack full intelligibility with Czech. do is the same verb (prim/pri/pri/primo/prite/pre vs. pravam/pravi/pravi/pravime/pravite/pravaat; as opposed to Serbian raditi) Some famous linguists who are acquaintances of mine (they have Wikipedia pages) told me that they thought that 90% was a good metric. Spanish is most mutually intelligible with Galician. There is as much Czech literature and media as Slovak literature and media in Slovakia, and many Slovaks study at Czech universities. Grammar is almost identical. There are many differences between Bulgarian and Russian speakers. But in the case of written Russian, you could elevate this number up to 70-80% quite easily. Im pretty sure things are identical in Belarus, if not worse afaik knowledge of Belarusian there is not too widespread in the first place. Although most words are in fact different, they are largely similar, being cognates, which makes both languages mutually intelligible to a significant extent; . 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. Intelligibility between Balachka and Ukrainian is not known. Czechs hardly ever study at Slovak universities. The Polish alphabet includes certain additional letters formed using diacritics: the kreska in the letters , , , , and through the letter in ; the kropka in the letter , and the ogonek ("little . This debate occurred only in Croatian linguistic circles, and the public knows nothing about it (Jembrigh 2014). They are essentially speaking the same language. In my opinion Czech and Slovak mutual intelligibility is not heavily exaggerated but actually very underrated(or some opposite word of exagerated, sorry for my poor english). If one takes the transitional dialects which make a triangle between Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, one can say that it is also one language. Because of all of this, tokavian speaker has a hard time understanding fast talking akavian speakers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58Aog4AJdQM. http://ifaq.wap.org/society/voweldeployment.html. Although even if they stuck to Polish/Ukrainian, they'd probably still understand each other. . Are ukrainian and russian mutually understandable? Often the two languages are genetically related, and they are likely to be similar to each other in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, or other features. Rusyn ~ Ukrainian . Polish Ukrainian Mutually Intelligible? | Animals - YouTube We speak in our own, or we speak locally. Cieszyn Silesian speakers strongly reject the notion that they speak the same language as Upper Silesians. 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. 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. All South Slavic languages in effect form a large dialect continuum of gradually mutually intelligible varieties depending on distance between the areas where they are spoken. Rural variations are usually less mutually intelligible. What Languages Are Mutually Intelligible With Serbian? Serbo-Croatian has only 20% intelligibility of Ukrainian. Czech completely and utterly incomprehensible. How come you have not done a post about 9/11 before Robert? However, the Croatian macrolanguage has strange lects that Standard Croatian (tokavian) cannot understand. However, Chakavian magazines are published even today (Jembrigh 2014). But the language isnt problem. 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. 50% Are belarusian and russian mutually intelligible? - AskingForAnswer Serbo-Croatian has variable intelligibility of Macedonian, averaging ~55%, while Nis Serbians have ~90% intelligibility with Macedonian. Bulgarian is a pluricentric language it has several literary norms. Do you speak Ukrainian. In other respects I am happy to say I manage to keep my identity clear of any overt nationalist definitions So I understood 100% But I admit that it was a relatively very easy text. It has been massively updated with a lot of new research from controlled scientific intelligibility studies. Macedonian side, the situation is more complicated (i will explain later). However, Balachka is dying out and is now spoken only by a few old people. Download Ebook Ukrainian Phrasebook And Dictionary Paperback The Torlakian spoken in the southeast is different. Click here to get a copy. Polish and Ukrainian have higher lexical similarity at 72%, and Ukrainian intelligibility of Polish is ~50%+. 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. 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). I have also friends from Central Macedonia (Prilep, Bitola) and I can tell how different they speak from the Skopjian dialect. Most of the Ukrainian speakers who do not speak Russian are in Canada at the moment. Serbo-Croatian dialects in relation to Slovene, Macedonian, and Bulgarian: The non-standard vernacular dialects of Serbo-Croatian (i.e. Ukrainian and Russian: How Similar Are These Two Languages? I am a native Macedonian and I totally dont agree with you. The intelligibility of Polish and Russian is very low, on the order of 5-10%. In the evening of the first day it reaches 93%, in a week 95%, all unsupervised, almost effortlessly, just by being there, watching, listening, talking and asking for an explanation here and there. Maybe I could offer you somehow help? Asymmetric intelligibility refers to two languages that are considered partially mutually intelligible, but where one group of speakers has more difficulty understanding the other language than the other way around. If you choose to learn a language which is at least to some extent mutually intelligible to a language you already know . IOW, I think there are two languages Czech and Slovak and I do not agree that they are the same language with two dialects. During the last 20 years, Ukraine has tried to make the language norm as far from Russian as possible for nationalistic reasons. 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. But still Slovene and Dalmatian akavian speaker can talk if they stick to old slavic part of their respective languages. You really need to go look at the new version of the paper. Scots and English are considered mutually intelligible. The latter is heavily mixed with Shtokavian. From the 1500s to 1900, a large corpus of Kajkavian literature was written. Personally, I must admit that Serbs from areas above Nis (cf. Chakavian has a low mutual intelligibility with either, in part due to its large number of loanwords from Venetian. The dialects of Ukrainian do not differ extensively from one another and are all mutually intelligible. I can understand anyone who speaks English, even those who speak it as foreigners might say too fast. http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists/usama-bin-laden/view If I tell them few sentences (phrases) in Boyko dialect, then Russians wont be able to understand at all. 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. a person with Virgin ears from any where in the Czech republic and west and central Slovakia will understand each other fairly well. When there, they have to pass a language test. 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. I speak Slovenian and Croats think that I can speak Kaikavian. The reason there are subtitles on Russian-language shows in Ukraine is because of Ukraines puristic state language policies. Therefore I would go with 25%. Slovenian language might be closer to the Macedonian/Bulgarian than to the Serbian language. What Are Mutually Intelligible Languages? I can give you an example of how I can read Bulgarian: ENGLISH: Bulgarian language is an Indo-European language from the group of South-Slavic languages. Intelligibility of Germanic languages underestimated Slovene has some commonalities with the West Slavic languages. All Rights Reserved. Mutual intelligibility with varieties of Serbo-Croatian is hindered by differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, Kajkavian being the most mutually intelligible. Frequency of exposure is one of the main causes of this. However, many groups of languages are partly mutually intelligible, i.e. Now tokavian and akavian. Conclusion: Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian Mutual Intelligibility - UniLang . Civis Illustris. The Polish langauge uses the Latin script, while the Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic. Mezentseva, Inna. Thanks so much for this post. 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. This has, however, more to do with the new Ukrainian norm. 60%? Lach is a Czech-Polish transitional lect with a close relationship with Cieszyn Silesian. I can easily translate the first two sentences: Bulgarian is the oldest documented Slavic language. The Chinese language, on the other hand, is comprised of a number of dialects that arent always mutually intelligible. Mutual intelligibility - Wikipedia Mitja Slane on Twitter: "@NOELreports How do they speak? Ukrainian is Score: 4.1/5 (74 votes) . It was probably in the same ballpark as Polish for me. @AJ NATO EU. Having lived in Moscow and being married to a Russian, I now speak Russian well enough to be mistaken for a Russian-speaking tourist from Poland or Lithuania when in Moscow. I cannot understand that much of kajkavski nor akavski, but I can understand more akavski than I can kajkavski. Is the virgin Intelligibility important? Interesting article but I think there are some minor and some major mistakes and misunderstandigs. So give these mutually intelligible languages a second look. This is a Chakavian-Slovenian transitional lect that is hard to categorize, but it is usually considered to be a Slovenian dialect. 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. I tested this on my wife by showing her news clips on Youtube. What Other Languages Can You Understand If You Know Russian? So here you have a case, when I could not understand everything, but I could grasp the meaning (at least). Just one example: the letter g was eliminated in order to make the Ukrainian h correspond exactly with Russian g. Russian has 85% intelligibility of Rusyn, 74% of oral Belorussian and 85% of written Belorussian, 60% of Balachka, 50% of oral Ukrainian and 85% of written Ukrainian, 36% of oral Bulgarian and 80% of written Bulgarian, 38% of Polish, 30% of Slovak and oral Montenegrin and 50% of written Montenegrin, 12% of oral Serbo-Croatian, 25% of written Serbo-Croatian, and 10% of Czech. Apart lack of understandability there are phrases that could be ill understood with famous Polish I am looking for the broom 8. It is important to note that the idea of this paper was try to test "pure inherent intelligibility." A pure inherent intelligibility test would involve a couple of things. [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]. If youre learning multiple languages at once, pairing similar languages is a great way to maximize your studying. The main difference is in the ortography. The only big one i disagree with your breakdown is serbian/croatian vs bulgarian. Cheers brothers and sisters! On the one hand, Belarussian has some dialects that are intelligible with some dialects of both Russian and Ukrainian. Could you please explain what you mean by language and intelligibility and hopefully remedy this failure of the original text? Serbs can read both cyrillic and latin without any problem even if that two scripts are mixed in a word or sentence. You also have these words? Maybe its a lack of vocabulary, but I havent heard that word from someone personally yet. Nevertheless Ukrainian intelligibility of Russian is hard to calculate because presently there are few Ukrainians in Ukraine who do not speak Russian. Being fluent in Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian gives you access to understanding more of other Slavic languages. With this, off I go to sleep. Polish uses Latin letters, just like English. So, when you're learning the Polish alphabet, all you have to pay attention to are the special accents and the pronunciation. Macedonian: 50-60 % Due to no prior exposure to Russian, I could not understand that language, other than a few words and expressions here and there. Its specific czech and many foreiner has problem spelling it. Writing in Chakavian started very early in the Middle Ages and began to slow down in the 1500s when writing in Kajkavian began to rise. If you take your 25 (supposedly from Novi Sad) and 90 from Nis, then we come to about 60 percent (from Serbian side). Eastern Slovak has 82% intelligibility of Rusyn and 72% of Ukrainian. A lect called iarija Slovenian is spoken on the Istrian Peninsula in Slovenia just north of Croatia. Other Western Slovak speakers (Bratislava) say that Eastern Slovak (Kosice) is hard to understand. It is rather controversial outside Linguistics, as you run into nationalists and other fools who emotionally distort things. When I visited Bulgaria I tried to communicate in Serbian language with the Bulgars. Ive yet to see a speaker of BCS that recognizes the obvious: these three languages are just the same. Silesian itself appears to be a macrolanguage as it is more than one language since as Opole Silesian speakers cannot understand Katowice Silesian, so Opole Silesian and Katowice Silesian are two different languages. Czech-Slovak is now 91%, Czech-Serbo-Croatian is 18%, Czech-Macedonian is 17% and Czech=-Bulgarian is 13%. 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. For example, those who learn Ukrainian will eventually know 70% of Polish lexicon and a . 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. And the same problem emerges in other situations. (j/k) "A New Methodology for Romance Classification". Understanding the connection between mutually intelligible languages, can make it easier to learn an additional language. Balgarski is balgarskijat, grupa is grupata, oficialni is oficijalnijat etc. Jeff Lindsay estimates that Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). Slovak has 91% intelligibility of Czech. For true MI testing, we want virgin ears, and it has to be both ways. Belarussian is nonetheless a separate language from both Ukrainian and Russian. 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 main Turkologist I worked with on that chapter told me that he thought 90% was a good metric. Spoken Bulgarian is very difficult to understand for other Slavs due to phonology and unique syllable stress. 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. Generally, when foreigners say speakers of a certain language speak too fast, speakers of that language can hear that fast speech just fine. To some extent, Russian, Rusyn, Ukrainian, and Belarusian retain a degree of mutual intelligibility. There was a lot of past Yugoslav politics that hid the truth. While not usually considered mutually intelligible, theres also enough similarity between French and Italian that speakers of Portuguese may understand both of these languages. Its mainly in the weird Bulgarian grammar! Some people in Croatia asked me if I speak Kajkavian when I spoke Slovenian with my friends. Czech 20 % spoken, 40 % written but the two languages are more different than some people think. This is great. 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. What about USAs dialects. I also recognize a Macedonian who speaks Serbian by the vowel e, and their sound of () is much softer than Serbian one, something between Serbian and or even as same as . I think this is very difficult for Macedonians to distinguish this two consonants and pronounce them correctly. Is Russian and Polish Mutually Intelligible? A koine is currently under development. I have the hardest time to understand anything of Bulgarian, it sounds really fast and choppy but similar to Russian sometimes. Complicating the picture is the fact that many Ukrainians are bilingual and speak Russian also. What I took as Czech speaking Czech language, which I perfectly understand, was actually Czech who tries to speaks Polish. Post 1991, g has returned. However Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are not like Czech and Slovak. Communication about such things is significantly impaired at this level. Polish: Ukrainian and Belarusian (both partially; moreover, . You are a smart guy. Briefly put, mutual intelligibility is when speakers of one language can understand a related language to some degree. 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. Student Authored Website. I would say that Macedonian is about 25% intelligible to a Serbian speaker that was never exposed to Macedonian. Most Macedonians already are able to speak Serbo-Croatian well. Czech: 10% & relat.)) There is just a little problem to understand east Slovaks for Czechs from naywhere. For example, all Russian shows get subtitles on Ukrainian TV. You would be amazed at how good peoples estimates of this sort of thing are though. Regarding Polish and Russian there are many words with opposite meaning. For me personally, Serbian is very interesting, because it sounds like Macedonian, but a bit different because of the declensions. Mi priamo Hrvatski jezik in neotokavian. Russian, the native language of 160 million people, including many . 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). Western Slovak speakers say Eastern Slovak sounds idiotic and ridiculous, and some words are different, but other than that, they can basically understand it. Between sources, you might find some claiming that two languages are mutually intelligible, while other sources claim those same languages arent. London Times, 25 September 2006 Polish lacks full intelligibility of Silesian, although this is controversial (see below). This is simply reality in Serbia today. Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family The main Shtokavian dialects of Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian are mutually intelligible. There are also some TV shows that show Czech and Slovak contestants untranslated (like in Sweden where Norwegian comics perform untranslated), and most people seem to understand these shows. Polish Ukrainian Mutually Intelligible? Languages Comparison I see your point, and I agree: there must be a difference in method when determining linguistic intelligibility based on different populations. The idea is that the Kajkavian and Chakavian languages simply do not exist, though obviously they are both separate languages. Most native speakers agree on MI. He gave me the 25% figure. There are distinct regional variations of Arabic. Your email address will not be published. They exist, but not in such a degree to render them unintelligible. Also akavian has some elements of its own. There is a big problem with this. Saris Slovak has 85% intelligibility of Polish. Some say that West Palesian is actually a separate language, but the majority of Belarussian linguists say it is a dialect of Belarussian (Mezentseva 2014). Mi povidamo Horvatski jazik means We speak croatian language in akavian. 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. December 2014. Ekavian Chakavian has two branches Buzet and Northern Chakavian. It was for me a bit strange, because Bulgarian science still supports the thesis that Macedonian is Bulgarian. Portuguese has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with Spanish, Galician, French and Italian. Lesser Polish, which can be heard in the south and southeast. Many Silesian speakers now speak a watered down version of Silesian which is more properly seen as a Polish dialect with some Silesian words. Yet its totally foreign to many in Croatia. Yet some say that the subtitles are simply put on as a political move due to Ukraines puristic language policy. This stuff is not all that controversial. Finally, I think the Ukrainians' mentality if more Polish, while the Russian mentality is more fourteenth century Mongol. Ikavian Chakavian has two branches Southwestern Istrian and Southern Chakavian. Polish and Ukrainian mutual intelligibility question. the interrogatives are much more similar (kda vs. koga when; kd~kud vs. kade where; to~kakv (second form is more characteristic of Bulgarian) vs. to what; koj/koja/koe/koi vs. koj/koja/koe/koi who/which/that (interr. If you speak Russian, you might be surprised at how much Ukrainian you understand. Croatian-Shtokavian is only a dialect of Serbian language. For example, the spirantisation of Slavic /g/ to /h/ is an areal feature shared by the Czech-Slovak group with both Ukrainian and Sorbian (but not with Polish). 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. 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. Much of the language has changed lots of Turkish loans have been dropped, plenty of standard Serbian terminology has made its way in but Ive had less of a communication issue in Kumanovo (north-eastern Macedonia) than Belgrade (capital of Serbia) back when I was but a young lad.