He estimated that Belarusian and Ukrainian were at least 80% mutually intelligible, accents and dialect aside, and that Russian was far . Grammar is almost identical. Jen. That barrier, however, is not too difficult to overcome. The main difference is in the ortography. In addition, Balachka language associations believe it is a separate language. (I will come to Bulgarian too). For the south slavic speakers, it is a commonism, almost a joke, for a Serb and a Croat to argue---in a mutually intelligible language---that . 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 But the end of the sentence clarified these words. some things in this article are heavily exaggerated. Not only are these Slavic languages very similar to Russian in written form, but they are also around 70% mutually intelligible. The distance of Slovene may seem unlikely, but I think that it is still rather optimistic, because Czech and Slovene are quite distant, despite geographical closeness. On the other hand, it can be difficult for Russians to understand Ukrainian (though it is easy for them to learn it). IOW, I think there are two languages Czech and Slovak and I do not agree that they are the same language with two dialects. The Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family is known for its languages being relatively closely related. These attacks killed over 200 people. That word have special meaning and I think that Serbian needs that word, but if I tell that word seriously while I speak, everybody will laugh at me. Serbo-Croatian has variable intelligibility of Macedonian, averaging ~55%, while Nis Serbians have ~90% intelligibility with Macedonian. Istorieskoto mu razvitie se charakterizira s etiri glavni perioda. It is not intelligible with Shtokavian, although this is controversial. . This difference is because Bulgarian is not spoken the same way it is written like Serbo-Croatian is. Its vocabulary has lots of common words with all of Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, so it's sort of mutually intelligible with all of them. 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: I thought this is Croatia! There is a big problem with this. The Croatians left Croatia and came to Italy from 1400-1500. 12 Dec 2016 #221. I think (as a native Serbian speaker from south eastern Belgrade) the main difference between Serbian and Macedonian is that Macedonian doesnt have cases and have definite articles as well. @AJ Not only that, but it is not even fully intelligible with the Eastern Slovak that it resembles most. There are numerous intelligibility tests out there that work very well, or you can just ask native speakers to give you a %, and most of the honest ones will tell you; in fact, they will often differentiate between oh that is our language, they speak the same language as us, for dialects and then no, that is not our language, that is different, and they do not speak our language for separate languages. I am afraid you are not right because if you take Serbian dialects till Nis, then they are very mutually intelligible with Macedonian! Probably, ja u da radim for Bosnians and Croatians sounds very Serbian. Russian is partially mutually intelligible with Ukrainian, Rusyn and Belarusian. http://www.network54.com/Forum/84302/thread/1284248981/last-1288620675/The+real+9-11+cover+up-+Political+hijacking++was+originally+aimed+at+Russia. I have to really focus and try hard to understand them but with patience I can get buy. Belarusian is, in a sense, in between other slavic languages. 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. I am communicating very often with speakers of the other Slavic languages, so I did an experiment and I tried to write something in Bulgarian for one first time. That is good to know. 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. Ukrainians and Belarusians understand each other's languages with no problem. In some respects, all Slavic languages have a lot in common. General. But in the case of written Russian, you could elevate this number up to 70-80% quite easily. Serbo-Croatian dialects in relation to Slovene, Macedonian, and Bulgarian: The non-standard vernacular dialects of Serbo-Croatian (i.e. I speak both Southern akavian and neotokavian. Jeff Lindsay estimates that Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). They are essentially speaking the same language. Slovenian language might be closer to the Macedonian/Bulgarian than to the Serbian language. 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. . Click here to get a copy. 5%? What percentage of Ukraine speaks Polish? My father once read an article in polish and he said he understood almost everything, but when its spoken he said about 60%. > Intelligibility problems are mostly on the Czech end, because they dont bother to learn Slovak, while many Slovaks learn Czech. This phenomenon is called asymmetrical mutual intelligibility. Is Russian and Polish Mutually Intelligible? Czech 20 % spoken, 40 % written About Slovak being two different unintelligible languages I highly doubt so. If you choose to learn a language which is at least to some extent mutually intelligible to a language you already know . A more updated version of this paper with working hyperlinks can be found on Academia.edu here. My guest from Ukraine will have to guess 6 animals that I'll describe to her in Polish. Ive almost never heard it in Lviv, except by visiting villagers or old people. can take anywhere. Although the standard view is that Balachka is a Ukrainian dialect, some linguists say that it is actually a separate language closely related to Ukrainian. Although even if they stuck to Polish/Ukrainian, they'd probably still understand each other. "A New Methodology for Romance Classification". 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. I do hope that you understand the point. 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. Portuguese also has a high degree of mutual intelligibility with Spanish. It has also been described as a transitional dialect between Polish and Slovak. 10%? But despite similarities in grammar and vocabulary and almost identical alphabets, they differ sharply in many ways and are not mutually intelligible. Polish ~ Kashubian . I was surprised that they never live in Slovenia and they never learn Slovenian. Albeit, Scots dialect is far more pronounced than English, and at times, can be unintelligible. Most pairs have no figure for written intelligibility. A Serbian friend of mine was estaunished to see how some Macedonian celebrities speak Serbian on the TV without accent. If one takes the transitional dialects which make a triangle between Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, one can say that it is also one language. 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. Given that Polish and Russian belong to different groups under the same language family, we can deduce that these two languages share a lot of similarities but also have many differences. Here are three critical ways in which Bulgarian and Russian speakers differ. It seems polish and bulgarian are the easiest for me to understand (save for bosnian, serbian, and crnogorski). Traditionally, dialects are regional variations of one main language. There can be huge differences between spoken/written forms of a Slavic language, because the written form may have a very similar vocabulary, phonology and grammar, but due to a different, strong stress, you wont understand almost anything. From his own words it is possible to conclude that mutual inteligibility between czech and slovak is very high, and Ive heard from young czechs that they still can understand slovak with no effort. . 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. 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). Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in . This term is similar to linguistic distance in that it can reflect how similar or different languages are. Congratulations on a brilliant article! You are wrong about Slovenian and Croatian languages. But still Slovene and Dalmatian akavian speaker can talk if they stick to old slavic part of their respective languages. The truth is that a person can often understand other dialects, except his native one. the copula is mostly the same (sm/si/e/smo/ste/su vs. sum/si/e/sme/ste/se) I can only speak from my personal experience (business trips to Czech Republic - Ostrava, Praha, Mlad Boleslav, Mikulov ). A Serbian native speaker felt that the percentages for South Slavic seemed to be accurate. Russian on the other hand uses the Cyrillic alphabet. Swarte will be awarded a PhD by the University of Groningen on 3 March. By the way, osnovnata (osnovna-ta) is related to the Czech word osnova (basis, outline). Despite a lot of commonality between the dialects, the differences between them are significant. wovel a shifts to o not shits hahhaha sorry. As a result, I, who spoke fluent Ukrainian when I moved from Ukraine 18 years ago, have problems following modern speech on TV. Russian. Serbo-Croatian and Russian have 10-15% intelligibility, if that, yet written intelligibility is higher at 25%. 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. We speak in our own, or we speak locally. As far as grammars are concerned (declension and conjugation), they are so similar that there is almost no effort in understanding that this noun is, for example, in dative plural, and that verb is imperfective past. Was he educated? In addition, the two groups have different cultural norms and values. Intelligibility data for Saris Slovak and Ukrainian is not known. Additionally, some Arabic speakers may be familiar with Egyptian Arabic through the media, so they may rely on this to bridge any language gaps. Go back to your kennel. Therefore I would go with 25%. An example of equal treatment of Malaysian and Indonesian: the, List of dialects or varieties sometimes considered separate languages, List of languages sometimes considered varieties, North Germanic languages Mutual intelligibility, Learn how and when to remove this template message, considered separate languages only for political reasons, "Listening instruction and patient safety: Exploring medical English as a lingua franca (MELF) for nursing education", "The Contribution of Linguistic Factors to the Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages", "Taking taxonomy seriously in linguistics: Intelligibility as a criterion of demarcation between languages and dialects", "uvalar: The Internal Classification & Migration of Turkic Languages", "Mutual Comprehensibility of Written Afrikaans and Dutch: Symmetrical or Asymmetrical? This is simply not the case. I have no problems understanding the Torlakian dialect. How much of Ukrainian can these Russians in Canada understand? If the Torlaks can understand those languages it is because they have been hearing them! I confess to not being a linguist, and therefore didnt see past the problematic sentence Apart lack of understandability there are phrases that could be ill understood with famous Polish I am looking for the broom Also, danes and swedes have a hard time understanding each other, but they can read the others language quite well. 6. 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. Very interesting. Polish is the most incomprehensible Slavic language for other Slavs, both spoken and written. Exposure doesnt count. CZECH: Bulharsk jazyk je indoevropsk jazyk ze skupiny jihoslovanskch jazyk. Between sources, you might find some claiming that two languages are mutually intelligible, while other sources claim those same languages arent. Hello Mr Lindsay, With Lonely Planet's Ukrainian Phrasebook, let no barriers . What Are Mutually Intelligible Languages? A Moravian Czech speaker (Eastern Czech) and a Bratislavan Slovak (Western Slovak) speaker understand each other very well. 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. 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. 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. Russian 20 % spoken, 30 % written So you believe the 9/11 narrative? Croatian-Shtokavian is only a dialect of Serbian language. Can you give me your name here or can you email me with your name, unless that is you in your email address there. uses the Cyrlic script, and a Banat norm, which uses the Latin script. Written intelligibility is often very different from oral intelligibility in that in a number of cases, it tends to be higher, often much higher, than oral intelligibility. Nice article, but I think there is a difference between spoken mutual intelligibility and different languages. Serbo-Croatian (Shtokavian) has 55% intelligibility of Macedonian (varies from 25-90%), 27% of Slovenian, 25% of Slovak, 20% of Ukrainian, 13% of oral Bulgarian and 25% of written Bulgarian, 10% of oral Russian and 22% of written Russian, 10% of Czech, and 5% of Polish. And yes, comprehension has suffered since Czechoslovakia broke up, due to lack of exposure. I have no idea, what Sledva da se otbelei, e tova means. 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). 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). 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). I must confess that as a Czech, I understand only little, what the Macedonian reporter is saying, and when I was listening to the first guy from Bosnia (Izetbegovi), I was often lost, understanding only slightly more, maybe 20-30%. 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. Download: Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? The more German the Silesian dialect is, the harder it is for Poles to understand. . In brief, there is some mutual intelligibility, enough to have a simple conversation of the 'me Tarzan - you Jane' type, speakin. I can randomly pick up another paragraph from that Wikipedia page, and it would be harder: About Boyko/Hutsul dialects which according to you are more understandable to Russian person than Ukrainian language I will disagree with you. Since then, Slovak has been disappearing from the Czech Republic, so the younger people dont understand Slovak so well. Re: Rus/Ukr Personal communication. Feb 22, 2020. In fact, I cannot often identify any words at all. Russian speakers are also likely to understand some Bulgarian, along with other Slavic languages to a lesser extent. Yes of course. These figures were tallied up for each pair of languages to be tabulated and were then all averaged together. According to Ethnologue, there are more than 7,000 languages in the world, with some being more difficult to learn than others. I have the hardest time to understand anything of Bulgarian, it sounds really fast and choppy but similar to Russian sometimes. Femke Swarte studied the mutual intelligibility of twenty Germanic language combinations. Hello, can you tell me, how much Kajkavian can your average Chakavian speaker understand in percentage? 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. Complicating the picture is the fact that many Ukrainians are bilingual and speak Russian also. Instead Eastern Lach and Western Lach have difficult intelligibility and are separate languages, so Lach itself is a macrolanguage. A professor of Slavic Linguistics at a university in Bulgaria reviewed the paper and felt that the percentages were accurate. Bulgarian is a pluricentric language it has several literary norms. The base of Molise Croatian was Shtokavian with an Ikavian accent and a heavy Chakavian base similar to what is now spoken as Southern Kajkavian Ikavian on the islands of Croatia. Macedonian side, the situation is more complicated (i will explain later). True MI testing does try to find virgin ears that have heard little of the other language and speak little or none of it. My mother is a native Croatian speaker and she told me that serbian and croatian have very good intelligibility but however the grammar is very different.Comparing those two languages would be like comparing czech and slovakian.