As a result, I, who spoke fluent Ukrainian when I moved from Ukraine 18 years ago, have problems following modern speech on TV. I will also send you a copy so you can look over the Serbo-Croatian part and tell me if there are any errors. Thank you very much for this. French has a reasonable degree of lexical similarity with Italian,Sardinian, Romansh, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish, making it partially mutually intelligible with these languages. Im The Lizard King, I Can Do Anything! President Musharraf of Pakistan says that the CIA has secretly paid his government millions of dollars for handing over hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects to America.. In other cases, I had to rely on the context. [2] As a consequence, spoken mutual intelligibility is not reciprocal. ????? However, my girlfriend never ever says these words and rather uses on and ona just like in Serbian. This is heartening, although Kajkavian as an existing spoken lect also needs to be recognized as a living language instead of a dialect of Croatian, whatever that word means. I also understand more of other Slavic languages then neotokavian speakers do. Some comments on Ukrainian: My gues. In Linguistics, this MI stuff is noncontroversial. But they would learn it quickly if they cared. Polish ~ Kashubian . It was probably in the same ballpark as Polish for me. On the one hand, Belarussian has some dialects that are intelligible with some dialects of both Russian and Ukrainian. It has also been described as a transitional dialect between Polish and Slovak. I would say that Macedonian is about 25% intelligible to a Serbian speaker that was never exposed to Macedonian. akavian is full of romanisms, kajkavian of germanisms and tokavian of turkish and other orientalisms. This is great. Russian is partially mutually intelligible with Ukrainian, Rusyn and Belarusian. Mr.Lindsay, There are many differences between Bulgarian and Russian speakers. 8. In fact, I would probably have a hard time to understand a Czech speaking with such an intonation. It is difficult to get a high-paying job that requires skill and . Polish and Russian while Slavic sounding to my ear and is maybe 5%-15% intelligible . When there, they have to pass a language test. The Chinese language, on the other hand, is comprised of a number of dialects that arent always mutually intelligible. Balgarski is balgarskijat, grupa is grupata, oficialni is oficijalnijat etc. The intelligibility of Belarussian with both Ukrainian and Russian is a source of controversy. Nice to meet you, Robert; Ill make sure to read more of your articles now! Nevertheless, although intelligibility with Slovenian is high, Kajkavian lacks full intelligibility with Slovenian. However, many groups of languages are partly mutually intelligible, i.e. Of course, the interviews are subtitled in Macedonian, but even an untrained ear and eye can see how similar these languages are. 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. I have also friends from Central Macedonia (Prilep, Bitola) and I can tell how different they speak from the Skopjian dialect. From some reason, the Hutsul, Lemko, andBoiko dialects of the Rusyn language are much more comprehensible to Russians than Standard Ukrainian is. What about USAs dialects. Traditionally, dialects are regional variations of one main language. It has a very high degree of mutual intelligibility with Galician (spoken in Northwestern Spain), which is a language thats sort of a cross between Portuguese and Spanish. WORD. Every major language has some dialects Also both sides are able to use standard Slovak. In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Many Ukrainian-speakers consider the language . Subtitles are absurd when 99% of the audience can already understand whats going on. Slovak: 20% Its grammar is close to that of Russian. 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. Maybe I could offer you somehow help? Vitebsk, Belarus. but what if person is from island and speaks heavy akavian and tokavian speaker is real tokavian like from Slavonia (North Eastern Croatia). Yes because governments dont conspire do they except for the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq war, drug trafficking, coups, supporting the same Islamic terrorism which is even mentioned in main stream press during the 90s with links to the 9/11 hijackers which we are now supposably fighting a phoney war on terror against. For instance, in 1932, Ukrainian g was eliminated from the alphabet in order to make Ukrainian h correspond perfectly with Russian g. After 1991, the g returned to Ukrainian. . 12 Dec 2016 #221. Foreign languages arent always as foreign as youd expect. Yes and if you could more than one listener, it would be great. 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. akavian differs from the other nearby Slavic lects spoken in the country due to the presence of many Italian words. Czech and Polish are incomprehensible to Serbo-Croatian speakers (Czech 10%, Polish 5%), but Serbo-Croatian has some limited comprehension of Slovak, on the order of 25%. It is more like the other slavic languages (v instead of u, z instead of s, itd, less vowels, and no distinction between and ). . 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. 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. Re: Rus/Ukr A western Slovak can even understand most of Ruthenians hen they are speaking. More? Russian has a decent intelligibility with Bulgarian, possibly on the order of 50%, but Bulgarian intelligibility of Russian seems lower. 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. ", "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"?! Serbo-Croatian dialects in relation to Slovene, Macedonian, and Bulgarian: The non-standard vernacular dialects of Serbo-Croatian (i.e. When you find out it is a separate language, you ask for %, and they often tell you! Civis Illustris. There is much nonsense floating around about Serbo-Croatian or Shtokavian. How close is Ukrainian language to Polish? Russian has high intelligibility of Belarussian, on the order of 75%. Slovak 50 % spoken, 70 % written Also sorry for my English. In addition, Balachka language associations believe it is a separate language. Just one example: the letter g was eliminated in order to make the Ukrainian h correspond exactly with Russian g. 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. Basically, you only hear a series of consonants with hardly recognizable vowels. This is simply not the case. In the present study we tested the level of mutual intelligibility between three West Slavic (Czech, Slovak and Polish) and three South Slavic languages (Croatian, Slovene and Bulgarian). The claim for separate languages is based more on politics than on linguistic science. If you're a foreign student, studying russian, it's unlikely you'd be able to understand Ukrainian at all. 60%? NATO EU. Scots and English are considered mutually intelligible. 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. Needless to say, Polish is very familiar too, except its phonology, getting the gist of which is just a matter of some time. It is rather controversial outside Linguistics, as you run into nationalists and other fools who emotionally distort things. 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). And, as it was already sad, all Slovaks understand czeh better than czech slovaks thanks to hostory and politics. 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. He gave me the 25% figure. Nobody Ive ever talked to that lived in Serbia had anything other than [u] for //. I do hope that you understand the point. most speakers of one language find it relatively easy to achieve some degree of understanding in the related language(s). Interesting article Serbs did not have the same language contact with the Macedonian language as Macedonians with Serbocroatian did. Go back to your kennel. I speak tokavski croatian (and can read and understand serbian (both cyrillic and latin) and can adapt my croatian to be more serbian grammatically and with vocabulary) and just recently I had a conversation where I spoke croatian and the other person spoke polish. The Polish langauge uses the Latin script, while the Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic. This debate occurred only in Croatian linguistic circles, and the public knows nothing about it (Jembrigh 2014). Slovenians have a very hard time understanding Poles and Czechs and vice versa. Ukrainian language, formerly called Ruthenian or Little Russian (now considered pejorative), Ukrainian Ukrans'ka mova, East Slavic language spoken in Ukraine and in Ukrainian communities in Kazakhstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and Slovakia and by smaller numbers elsewhere. That information is in error. And the same problem emerges in other situations. Pobrzajte in Serbian means (pourite) but I understand it because brzo means fast and prefix po also exists in Serbian, and the imperative form is the same. Ukrainian pronounces the "o" as "o" whereas Russians pronounce it typically as an "a." The Ukrainian "" and "" have different pronunciations compared to their Russian equivalents, "" and "". We also participate in other affiliate advertising programs for products and services we believe in. Its vocabulary and grammar has enough similarities for Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians to understand each other well, whereas Russians understand only will recognise separate words. Bulgarian more comprehensible than standard Ukrainian. Also how much of Rusyn do Russians understand on a % basis? Give me a figure in % for the Rusyn if you would. A Serb gave me this information. 0%. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? I have had people give me personal estimates like 40%, 85%, 60-65%, 70%,10-15%, less than 1%, etc. Kashubian itself is a macrolanguage made up of two different languages, South Kashubian and North Kashubian, as the two have difficult intelligibility. "A New Methodology for Romance Classification". If you take your 25 (supposedly from Novi Sad) and 90 from Nis, then we come to about 60 percent (from Serbian side). Why not look em up on his site. However, many of these dialects are at least partially mutually intelligible. It shows that Macedonians indeed grew up to certain extent as bilingual Macedonian-Serbian. 10%? The standard view among linguists seems to be that Lach is a part of Czech. In the case of Croatian and Slovene, the intelligibility is asymmetric, since Slovene participants could understand Croatian better than vice versa. For instance, Portuguese and Spanish have a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility, but theyre technically separate languages. Hello Mr Lindsay, Its often said that all Slavic languages are mutually intelligible with each other. As a non-Ukrainian (as well as non-Polish) native speaker, I can understand Ukrainian through Polish more easily than Russian, even though I actually studied Russian formally, but never Ukrainian-:) . Still others (for example, Voegelin and Voegelin 1977) recognize just two main dialect groups: Eastern and Western Ukrainian. Have every heard of Dubrovnik dialect? Required fields are marked *. What if akavian person is from dalmatian coastal village which is now half tokavised and tokavian speaker is from Dalmatian city which still has some elements of akavian, ikavian yat and is full of romanisms? There is a group of Bulgarians living in Serbia in the areas of Bosilegrad and Dimitrovgrad who speak a Bulgarian-Serbian transitional dialect, and Serbs are able to understand these Bulgarians well. Despite all of this, Ukrainian and Russian aren't the closest languages in the Slavic language family, and they're not even mutually intelligible. Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian have 10-15% oral intelligibility, however, there are Bulgarian dialects that are transitional with Torlak Serbian. My email is on the Contact page. Standard Czech and standard Slovak is almost totally intelligible (I would say about 90%) only very few words are of different origin. The answer is that Izetbegovi is speaking too fast, he is often basically mumbling, and due to the different stress, I cannot identify, where the words start and end. There is a big problem with this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58Aog4AJdQM. Sign languages are independent of spoken languages and follow their own paths of development. Far Northeastern Slovak (Saris Slovak) near the Polish border is close to Polish and Ukrainian. I would like to know if anyone could confirm that you could indeed . Mutual intelligibility also occurs in a wide variety of degrees, ranging from none, to partial, to full mutual intelligibility. Personally, I must admit that Serbs from areas above Nis (cf. Jen. Student Authored Website. In other respects I am happy to say I manage to keep my identity clear of any overt nationalist definitions 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. Polish is the most incomprehensible Slavic language for other Slavs, both spoken and written. If I tell them few sentences (phrases) in Boyko dialect, then Russians wont be able to understand at all. 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. Im gonna estimate 40% for Bulgarian, cant really say what the difference between written and spoken Bulgarian would be for me. Because of all of this, tokavian speaker has a hard time understanding fast talking akavian speakers. Main difference between akavian, kajkavian and tokavian is in vocabulary. But other results that included Czech and Bulgarian were very poor. The German influence is more prominent in the west; Polish influence is greater in the east. Croatian linguist. 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. Eastern Slovak has 82% intelligibility of Rusyn and 72% of Ukrainian. http://www.network54.com/Forum/84302/thread/1284248981/last-1288620675/The+real+9-11+cover+up-+Political+hijacking++was+originally+aimed+at+Russia, http://www.network54.com/Forum/84302/thread/1289113786/last-1289113786/British+intelligence+links+to+African+Emabssy+bombings, http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/sheikhmedia.htm, http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists/usama-bin-laden/view, http://ifaq.wap.org/society/voweldeployment.html, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58Aog4AJdQM, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1n9KMawa-8, https://www.academia.edu/4080349/Mutual_Intelligibility_of_Languages_in_the_Slavic_Family, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9, 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, Alt Left: Ukrainian Nazis Execute Two of Their Own Men for Refusing to Fight, The Conquest of Germany and Japan Never Ended, Protected: Post to Discuss All of the Various POIs and Theories in the Delphi Murders from the Crime to the Present, Protected to Avoid Libel and Character Assassination Part 10, NATO Helped the Ukrainians Fire All Those Drones at Russia, Including all the Way to Moscow, The Conquest and Destruction of Russia Project Goes Way Back to Post World War 2, The Jewish Conspiracy To Subject Humankind. The Mutually Intelligible Languages of 8 Popular World Languages 1. How do they arrive at these estimates? 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). There is . We found that Czech and Slovak have by far the highest level of mutual intelligibility, followed by Croatian and Slovene. 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. FluentU brings a language to life with real-world videos. Macedonian side, the situation is more complicated (i will explain later). More properly, their speech is best seen as closer to Macedonian than to Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian. Hag_Boulder 9 mo. Borg, Albert J.; Azzopardi-Alexander, Marie (1997). Buzet is actually transitional between Slovenian and Kajkavian. This list focuses on common languages widely thought to be at least partially and 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. She doesn't speak any Polish so it's going to be an interesting challenge. The Russian language in the Ukraine has been declining recently mostly because since independence, the authorities have striven to make the new Ukrainian as far away from Russian as possible by adopting the Kharkiv Standard adopted in 1927 and jettisoning the 1932 Standard which brought Ukrainian more in line with Russian. Jembrigh, Mario. Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). 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. 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 As a native of Ni, I can say that the Serbo-CroatianMacedonian figures might be roughly on-point. Older people who rembember federation understand everything. If the Torlaks can understand those languages it is because they have been hearing them! This implies that some of the high intelligibility between Slovak and Polish may be due to bilingual learning on the part of Slovaks. ENGLISH: Bulgarian language is an Indo-European language from the group of South-Slavic languages. Click here to get a copy. Swarte will be awarded a PhD by the University of Groningen on 3 March. 6. Silesian or Upper Silesian is also a separate language spoken in Poland, often thought to be halfway between Polish and Czech. Intelligibility testing between East and West Slovak would seem to be in order. "The Linguistic Innovation Emerging From Rohingya Refugees." 40% of Silesian vocabulary is different from Polish, mostly Germanisms. 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). So I tried with my native Slovenian language and I was surprised how well Bulgars understand Slovenian language. As such, spoken Danish and Swedish normally have low mutual intelligibility,[2] but Swedes in the resund region (including Malm and Helsingborg), across a strait from the Danish capital Copenhagen, understand Danish somewhat better, largely due to the proximity of the region to Danish-speaking areas. He said if he was there for about a week he could understand probably everything.