They are native Kajkavian speakers and this is another proof that Kajkavian is actually Slovenian. What Are Mutually Intelligible Languages? If you speak Russian, it will be easier for you to understand other Slavic languages, which include Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene. What percentage of Ukraine speaks Polish? For me personally, Serbian is very interesting, because it sounds like Macedonian, but a bit different because of the declensions. 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. 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. Spanish and Catalan have a lexical similarity of 85%. 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. Hello Mr Lindsay, Slovak somewhat more than Polish, but still very little. In my experience, its quite easy. 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 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). 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. Ukrainian has 62% lexical similarity with Russian but 70% with Polish, which isn't high enough for mutual intelligibility with both Russian and Polish, but Poles can certainly understand Ukrainian much better than Russian, and Russians can understand Ukrainian much better than Poles. Three different methods were used: a word translation task, a cloze test and a picture task. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. So, when you're learning the Polish alphabet, all you have to pay attention to are the special accents and the pronunciation. Around year 550 Slovenians went west and Macedonians/Bulgars went south. The idea is that the Kajkavian and Chakavian languages simply do not exist, though obviously they are both separate languages. If you choose to learn a language which is at least to some extent mutually intelligible to a language you already know . But they would learn it quickly if they cared. Polish has 22% intelligibility of Silesian, 12% of Czech, 6% of Russian, and 5% of Bulgarian. Perhaps you would care to explain why the FBI has NOT charged Osama Bin Ladin with 9/11 but with the African Embassy bombings. It is commonly believed that all Slavic languages are fully mutually intelligible, which implies that they are close Its often said that all Slavic languages are mutually intelligible with each other. | 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. Croats say Macedonian is a complete mystery to them. 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). I can read and understand a lot of Bulgarian in written form, its basically old slavic , many such words are simply obsolete or archaic in modern serbian, but i do get the gist of any written article. . Re: Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian Mutual Intelligibility. For Macedonian without knowledge of other Slavic languages is also difficult to understand all the words which come from Russian and which are not current in Macedonian. Scientific intelligibility studies of Czech and Slovak have shown ~82% quite high but still low enough for them to be closely related separate languages and not dialects of one language. Kajkavian differs from the other Slavic lects spoken in Croatia in that is has many Hungarian and German loans (Jembrigh 2014). But islanders more often say Mi povidamo na nau or domau. 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. Lesser Polish, which can be heard in the south and southeast. Ukrainians can understand Russian much better than the other way around. With Lonely Planet's Ukrainian Phrasebook, let no barriers . Its mainly in the weird Bulgarian grammar! Slovenian: 20% Please listen and watch the movie Zona Zamfirova. Nice article, but I think there is a difference between spoken mutual intelligibility and different languages. 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. Ni Torlak vowel reflexes are otherwise in line with standard Serbian and Northwestern Macedonian, deriving nuclear /u e i e u r/ from / y * *l *r/; some Torlak dialects towards Kosovo or Bulgaria instead have [l ~ l] for /l/ (giving [v()l(:)k] where Serbian normally has [v:k]) but none in my vicinity. You would be amazed at how good peoples estimates of this sort of thing are though. Reading a Bulgarian text is not like reading an ordinary book in Czech, it would cost my brain much more kilojoules (but maybe mainly due to the monotonous Cyrilic script), but it is possible. Many people know cases well but simply dont want to speak them correctly in conversation with someone who doesnt speak them correctly because that makes them feel like they want to judge other people who doesnt use cases correctly or that makes them more educated, even more smart, than someone who doesnt use it, and that makes both sides uncomfortable. A Serb gave me this information. And the 25% is very low. Its spelling, however, is quite different from any of them. Below is an incomplete list of fully and partially mutually intelligible languages, that are so similar that they are sometimes considered not to be separate, but merely varieties of the same language. Slovenians have a very hard time understanding Poles and Czechs and vice versa. But they are unaware of the fact that islander have a lot of latin but also old Croatian (Slavic) words instead of Turkish which are used by supossedly more Croatian tokavian speaker. Answer (1 of 16): I'm neither Polish nor Ukrainian but I know Polish to a good level and basic Ukrainian; I can comment on the understandability of Ukrainian for Poles. Yet, it is closer to Russian that standard Ukrainian. In this case, too, however, while mutual intelligibility between speakers of the distant remnant languages may be greatly constrained, it is likely not at the zero level of completely unrelated languages. 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. Personally, I must admit that Serbs from areas above Nis (cf. Contents1 Can Slovenians understand Croatian?2 What languages are mutually intelligible with Croatian?3 What is the closest language to Slovenian?4 Which two . Polish and Ukrainian have higher lexical similarity at 72%, and Ukrainian intelligibility of Polish is ~50%+. Ability of speakers of two language varieties to understand the other, As a criterion for identifying separate languages, List of languages sometimes considered varieties, List of dialects or varieties sometimes considered separate languages, Alexander M. Schenker. Intelligibility problems are mostly on the Czech end because they dont bother to learn Slovak while many Slovaks learn Czech. Intelligibility between the two is estimated at 82%. Its often said that Czechs and Poles can understand each other, but this is not so. let me guess, British bankers/Zionists/Rosthchild family/British oil companies/British special forces/Mossad was behind it? This implies that some of the high intelligibility between Slovak and Polish may be due to bilingual learning on the part of Slovaks. Most people in Slovenia learn Serbian language so it is hard to estimate the real mutual intelligibility between Slovenian and Serbian language. Ikavian Chakavian has two branches Southwestern Istrian and Southern Chakavian. It exists in differing degrees among many related or geographically proximate languages of the world, often in the context of a dialect continuum. A question: how is it decided that the cut-off between a language and dialect is 90% MI? There are distinct regional variations of Arabic. . I think it was mostly due to a learning few high frequency Polish words that are difficult for a Russian native speaker to understand. They say, ~60%, ~65%, etc. These figures were tallied up for each pair of languages to be tabulated and were then all averaged together. However, there are dialects in between Ukrainian and Russian such as the Eastern Polissian and Slobozhan dialects of Ukrainian that are intelligible with both languages . Dont let the past politics fool you. In fact, I cannot often identify any words at all. [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. 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. Southern Slovak on the Hungarian border has a harder time understanding Polish because they do not hear it much. Comment * document.getElementById("comment").setAttribute( "id", "ac933fc62d348b183dfc4516edf000ec" );document.getElementById("b83dbe3da2").setAttribute( "id", "comment" ); document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. Usually, theyre at least partially mutually intelligible with the main language they stem from. One of the most bizarre cases is that of Bulgarian, where the level of mutual intelligibility with spoken Czech is very low (close to zero), due to a completely different grammar. Crazy! 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. However, it appears to be a separate language, as Lach is not even intelligible within itself. 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. 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. 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. Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family. Northern Germanic languages spoken in Scandinavia form a dialect continuum where two furthermost dialects have almost no mutual intelligibility. Give me a figure in % for the Rusyn if you would. I would hazzard to say that Polish and Czech languages are at minimum 50% Intelligible and comprehensible between Poles and Czechs (when spoken with normal pace ) and at least 60-70% . When there, they have to pass a language test. 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. non-Shtokavian dialects: Kajkavian, Chakavian and Torlakian) diverge more significantly from all four normative varieties. Russian speakers are also likely to understand some Bulgarian, along with other Slavic languages to a lesser extent. 40% of Silesian vocabulary is different from Polish, mostly Germanisms. Polish and Ukrainian mutual intelligibility question. [1] Polish is spoken outside of Poland by Polish diaspora groups in countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom. 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. Even little kids who watch the show understand. That barrier, however, is not too difficult to overcome. Salute from Czech republic. 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. I must admit that knowing English, German and French also helped me since Polish readily uses borrowings from these languages where Russian prefers Slavic words. I guess this would not have worked for Macedonian and Slovene in the Yugoslav army. Yet there is a dialect continuum between Slovenian and Kajkavian. Since the breakup, young Czechs and Slovaks understand each other worse since they have less contact with each other. Borg, Albert J.; Azzopardi-Alexander, Marie (1997). Post 1991, g has returned. For instance, Portuguese and Spanish have a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility, but theyre technically separate languages. I am a native Macedonian and I totally dont agree with you. 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. Yet its totally foreign to many in Croatia. In recent years, many of the German words are falling out of use and being replaced by Polish words, especially by young people. 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. What languages are mutually intelligible with Russian? 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%. pouv cyrilici, a bantsk norma, kter pouv latinku. However, a Croatian linguist has helped me write part of the Croatian section, and he felt that at least that part of the paper was accurate. 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. I work with Russians (dro. Congratulations on a brilliant article! 25/01/23 | StarsInsider. If you choose to study a language thats mutually intelligible with one you already know, chances are youll have to put a lot less work in than if you were learning a language from scratch. This makes Polish a much much easier language to learn than Russian. However, lexical similarity focuses on exclusively overlapping vocabulary to determine similarity between languages. Sorry for my English, Im still learning itespecially right word order. For Kai-Cha it was less shocking as many words were taught by their parents (or they remembered them from childhood, before the school system forces you to use only the Std Cro). Student Authored Website. Saris Slovak has high but not complete intelligibility of Polish, possibly 85%. Yes and if you could more than one listener, it would be great. According to a paper on Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family (link in comments): Native Belarusian speakers can understand 80% of spoken Ukrainian and 80% of written . That being said, the line between a language and a dialect is often blurred. There is much nonsense said about the mutual intelligibility of the various languages in the Slavic family. How come you have not done a post about 9/11 before Robert? This is a great boon to travelers and language learners. Also after studying Ethnologue for a very long time, I noticed that they tended to use 90% as a cutoff for language versus dialect most but not all of the time. Russian. However, Russian is only 74% mutually intelligible with spoken Belarusian and 50% mutually intelligible with spoken Ukrainian. Most pairs have no figure for written intelligibility. The intelligibility of Belarussian with both Ukrainian and Russian is a source of controversy. the copula is mostly the same (sm/si/e/smo/ste/su vs. sum/si/e/sme/ste/se) 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). Likewise with Polish vs Czech, and Slovenian vs Standard Croatian (these pairs are the most commonly mistaken as mutually intelligible). According to former Pakistani President Musharraf Omar Sheikh who wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta was recruited during the 90s by British intelligence. Torlakians are often said to speak Bulgarian, but this is not exactly the case. Then she talks about the cards in the bags, I again understand everything, but at 0:47, another stream of unintelligible sounds is starting. Like rano i utro or kanapa dywan kawior. Serbo-Croatian dialects in relation to Slovene, Macedonian, and Bulgarian: The non-standard vernacular dialects of Serbo-Croatian (i.e. I've ne. Is Ukrainian closer to Russian or Polish? The thesis that Bulgarian and Macedonian are the same language is not real in the practice. Mutually Intelligible And Different. Id guess mutual intelligibility there is somewhere on the level of 75~80%, which is pretty pathetic. Czech and Slovak are simply dialects of this one tongue. How many English speakers know Serbo-Croatian? Despite a lot of commonality between the dialects, the differences between them are significant. Ive done tests with my friends shtokavians-only (or monolingual Croats regarding the situation here) and it was very interesting. And Shtokavian is dialect of Serbian language. Although different writing systems are used, there are many similarities in the grammar used, such as Russian, Polish, and 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. I got that figure from a Serb. Slovenian language might be closer to the Macedonian/Bulgarian than to the Serbian language. Polish uses Latin letters, just like English. Around 80% comprehension, it gets hard to talk about complex or technical things. However, there are dialects in between Ukrainian and Russian such as the Eastern Polissian and Slobozhan dialects of Ukrainian that are intelligible with both languages. Vedle hlavn, pouvan v Bulharsku, existuje jet makedonsk norma, kter tak (?) 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 . To deal with the conflict in cases such as Arabic, Chinese and German, the term Dachsprache (a sociolinguistic "umbrella language") is sometimes seen: Chinese and German are languages in the sociolinguistic sense even though speakers of some varieties cannot understand each other without recourse to a standard or prestige form. 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). In terms of pronunciation, Ukrainian or Southeastern Yiddish can be considered to occupy an intermediate position between Northeastern and Central Yiddish. Silesian or Upper Silesian is also a separate language spoken in Poland, often thought to be halfway between Polish and Czech. It's also highly intelligible with Portuguese in writing, though less so when spoken. Are Russian and Polish mutually intelligible? (I will come to Bulgarian too). The Torlakian spoken in the southeast is different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1n9KMawa-8 Complaints have been made that many of these percentages were simply wild guesses with no science behind them. Can you give me a figure for how much of a Bulgarian text you can understand? How this is measured varies, but mutual intelligibility and vocabulary overlap, and often play a role in these calculations. Conclusion: Russian has high intelligibility of Belarussian, on the order of 75%. People observing conversation between Cieszyn Silesian and Upper Silesian report that they have a hard time understanding each other. Russia) in Canada, and they barely can understand standard Ukrainian. Download: Was he educated? In addition, Balachka language associations believe it is a separate language. This is also true of vocabulary and other aspects. Is there any particular method to determine this? I have no problems understanding the Torlakian dialect. http://ifaq.wap.org/society/voweldeployment.html. The more German the Silesian dialect is, the harder it is for Poles to understand. But being that they are Slavic with the same or similar grammar and structure you pick up different slavic languages and their style very quick. The person did not understand everything what I wrote. Very interesting. Now tokavian and akavian. I can barely understand czech (slovak I havent tried) and, as similar as it is to croatian, I can only understand a little slovenian. The translation is not very problematic. In other respects I am happy to say I manage to keep my identity clear of any overt nationalist definitions But akavian being archaic it has old slavic package. Polish lacks full intelligibility of Silesian, although this is controversial (see below). The Czech law even states that Slovak language can be used in schools and in official documents. Kajkavski it seems has changed less than akavski. Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). Many Ukrainian-speakers consider the language . Pronunciation is quite different, but all patterns are easy to catch.