The problem is that most linguists are not interested in scientific intelligibility testing of language pairs. They are native Kajkavian speakers and this is another proof that Kajkavian is actually Slovenian. Serbia is large and you should also ask Serbians in other regions. However, many of these dialects are at least partially mutually intelligible. 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. Thank you very much for this. Belarusian is closer to Polish and Ukrainian than Russian. Or when I heard the word pobrzajte (hurry up (plural)) it was very interesting to me. This debate occurred only in Croatian linguistic circles, and the public knows nothing about it (Jembrigh 2014). Kajkavian is fairly uniform across its speech area, whereas Chakavian is more diverse (Jembrigh 2014). People from Lviv and larger cities and towns in western Ukraine have a slight clipped accent but they speak standard Ukrainian. If we follow this line of reasoning, it would be correct to conclude that English is highly intelligible to Serbian speakers because most Serbs speak English. How much Slovene can your average Chakavian speaker understand? Languages can also be mutually intelligible only in spoken forms such as Polish and Ukrainian or only in written forms such as Icelandic and Faroese. Slovak is closely related to Czech, to the point of mutual intelligibility to a very high degree, as well as Polish.Like other Slavic languages, Slovak is a fusional language with a complex system of morphology and relatively flexible word order. Russian is partially mutually intelligible with Ukrainian, Rusyn and Belarusian. This is great. Clearly it WAS the Illuminati at workI guess the planes were flown by shapeshifting lizards, toooh, come to think of it, isnt George Bush Junior a lizard, too! Rural variations are usually less mutually intelligible. 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? 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. It has been massively updated with a lot of new research from controlled scientific intelligibility studies. But still Slovene and Dalmatian akavian speaker can talk if they stick to old slavic part of their respective languages. The only big one i disagree with your breakdown is serbian/croatian vs bulgarian. Also akavian has some elements of its own. Was he from Belgrade or Novi Sad or Nis? Slovak-Czech MI tests out at 82% in studies, which seems about right. Kajkavian differs from the other Slavic lects spoken in Croatia in that is has many Hungarian and German loans (Jembrigh 2014). Spoken Bulgarian is very difficult to understand for other Slavs due to phonology and unique syllable stress. On the other hand, it can be difficult for Russians to understand Ukrainian (though it is easy for them to learn it). So you are a speaker of Southern Chakavian, right? At some point he probably became a rogue or double agent, General Musharraf says. If you're a foreign student, studying russian, it's unlikely you'd be able to understand Ukrainian at all. I am a native Czech speaker, I understand Slovak (a lot of exposure, many visits, many colleagues) and Russian (studied at school, many visits) in all three languages I am close 100% understanding of news, yet for Polish, Ukrainian and Croat I would rate my understanding at 15-20%, with no significant improvement just from being in the country (I have spent in total about 20 weeks in Croatia, 4 in Ukraine, 3 in Poland). CZECH: Bulharsk jazyk je indoevropsk jazyk ze skupiny jihoslovanskch jazyk. This is simply not the case. 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. And the same problem emerges in other situations. the use of the accusative is nearly identical in Ni Torlak and Kumanovo Macedonian (cannot say the same for standard Macedonian as it has no accusative to begin with) and is, in general, more of an oblique case than anything else Also I have a long article coming up as a chapter in a peer reviewed book being published out of Turkey. Serbs/Croats used to live in the south Poland and they moved south to the current location. I can understand about 50% 75% of Bulgarian and Macedonian enough to get buy and carry on a conversation. [1] German is partially mutually intelligible with Yiddish and Dutch. Jeff Lindsay estimates that Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). Linguistic distance is the relative degree of difference between languages or dialects. Get 70% off + 10 languages + 14 day free trial. Can you give me your name here or can you email me with your name, unless that is you in your email address there. 60%? https://www.academia.edu/4080349/Mutual_Intelligibility_of_Languages_in_the_Slavic_Family They have more in common than you might think! 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 . Salute from Czech republic. Robert Lindsay. It is very strange when some words are not understood, although the communication is possible. Jen. #5. Routledge. You are a smart guy. Standard Czech and standard Slovak is almost totally intelligible (I would say about 90%) only very few words are of different origin. I tested this on my wife by showing her news clips on Youtube. 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-:) . If you speak Russian, you might be surprised at how much Ukrainian you understand. Like rano i utro or kanapa dywan kawior. Ekavian Chakavian has two branches Buzet and Northern Chakavian. Torlakian (considered a subdialect of Serbian Old Shtokavian by some) has significant mutual intelligibility with Macedonian and Bulgarian. . However, it appears to be a separate language, as Lach is not even intelligible within itself. The unintelligibility is only due to the manner of speaking and not because of lexical and/or grammatical differences. It is not true at all that Ukrainian and Russian are mutually intelligible, as Russian only has 50% intelligibility of Ukrainian. I am really sorry, but if you are speaking about science, you cannot just say. He printed out the paper and showed it to his colleagues at the next meeting, and they spent some time discussing it. What Are Mutually Intelligible Languages? Ukrainian, and Belarusian. 12 Dec 2016 #221. No idea, but if they are fairly intelligent as she sounds like she is, you might be shocked at how she might be able to rattle off some estimated figures like that. Ukrainian is a lineal descendant of the colloquial language used in Kievan Rus (10th-13th century). In other words, Ukrainian speakers can often understand Russian, while Russian speaker doesn't understand Ukrainian, especially Russian speakers from outside Ukraine. Russian is followed by Polish with over 40 million speakers, Ukrainian with 33 million and Czech with 13 million. Now onto the discussion. [8], However, others have suggested that these objections are misguided, as they collapse different concepts of what constitutes a "language".[9]. I think Robert has done articles on 9/11 conspiracy theories and their level of crediblity, yeah. Rather than 95%, or 85%. My take on it is right here. In addition, a Net search was done of forums where speakers of Slavic languages were discussing how much of other Slavic languages they understand. Kajkavski it seems has changed less than akavski. 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). A lect called iarija Slovenian is spoken on the Istrian Peninsula in Slovenia just north of Croatia. Subtitles are absurd when 99% of the audience can already understand whats going on. What language is this? Pei Mario (1949). French has 89% lexical similarity with Italian, 80% similarity with Sardinian (spoken on the Italian island of Sardinia), 78% similarity with Romansh (spoken in parts of Switzerland) and 75% similarity with Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. Czech 20 % spoken, 40 % written Ive done tests with my friends shtokavians-only (or monolingual Croats regarding the situation here) and it was very interesting. That movie doesnt have subtitle in Serbia but I think its a big mistake. I can randomly pick up another paragraph from that Wikipedia page, and it would be harder: As an addendum, Id like to make it known that my own grandmother, who hails from a village some twenty kilometers southwest of Ni, got lost in Belgrade once but has no problem getting around Skopje. Slovenian while it sounds slavic to me is not intelligible at all save for a few words here and there. Chakavian actually has a written heritage, but it was mostly written down long ago. You cannot simply separate the articles from the words during a regular conversation. Slovak somewhat more than Polish, but still very little. Youre welcome Robert, for a non-slavic speaker, you have a pretty good grasp of these linguistic niceties. If the central varieties die out and only the varieties at both ends survive, they may then be reclassified as two languages, even though no actual language change has occurred during the time of the loss of the central varieties. Heres his interview with Bosnian figures, and Bosnian is part of B/H/S landscape 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. Czech-Polish is not at 12% anymore, a new study has found it is 32%. most speakers of one language find it relatively easy to achieve some degree of understanding in the related language(s). I work with Russians (dro. However, another view is that Lach is indeed Lechitic, albeit with strong Czech influence. PS More than half of Slovenian seems to be closely related to Kaikavian and Chakavian Croatian (and probably Old Shtokavian which is almost extinct). This difference is because Bulgarian is not spoken the same way it is written like Serbo-Croatian is. All Rights Reserved. Colloquial Ukrainian spoken in most of the country is pretty much comprehensible to Russians. This is a Chakavian-Slovenian transitional lect that is hard to categorize, but it is usually considered to be a Slovenian dialect. 7. 3. Spanish and Catalan have a lexical similarity of 85%. I think that this article is full of dubious numbers, but this is not necessarily the authors fault. 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. Bulgarian and Macedonian can understand each other to a great degree (65-80%) but not completely. Bulharsk jazyk je plurocentrick jazyk m nkolik kninch norem. It was formerly thought to be a Slovenian dialect, but some now think it is more properly a Kajkavian dialect. Since then, Slovak has been disappearing from the Czech Republic, so the younger people dont understand Slovak so well. Contents1 Can Slovenians understand Croatian?2 What languages are mutually intelligible with Croatian?3 What is the closest language to Slovenian?4 Which two . It is no surprise that Ukrainian (and to a smaller extent) Belarusian have tons of Polish words, and are therefore more lexically similar to Polish than to Russian. Have every heard of Dubrovnik dialect? It consists of at least four major dialects, Ekavian Chakavian, spoken on the Istrian Peninsula, Ikavian Chakavian, spoken in southwestern Istria, the islands of Bra, Hvar, Vis, Korula, and olta, the Peljeac Peninsula, the Dalmatian coast at Zadar, the outskirts of Split and inland at Gacka, Middle Chakavian, which is Ikavian-Ekavian transitional, and Ijekavian Chakavian, spoken at the far southern end of the Chakavian language area on Lastovo Island, Janjina on the Peljeac Peninsula, and Bigova in the far south near the border with Montenegro. Just one example: the letter g was eliminated in order to make the Ukrainian h correspond exactly with Russian g. He said he is frequent visitor in Poland and therefore he speaks Polish. 10%? But in the case of written Russian, you could elevate this number up to 70-80% quite easily. In terms Even the most common, most simple words sound alien in spoken Bulgarian, VODA(WATER) is pronounced ,VODA . As soon as one gets even a very moderate amount of exposure, comprehension improves, even between such geographically distant languages as Polish and Serbian I remember staying in Montenegro and a Pole buying bread and a Montenegrin could still communicate with each other speaking at a slow-enough pace. The post-1991 reforms of the Ukrainian language were not an introduction of Polish or Western Ukrainian as some Russian nationalists (and non-nationalists, who believe them) claim, but rather a return to a standard adopted in Kharkiv in 1927. Do Ukrainians and Polish like each other? Paul McGrane. A different dialect is spoken in each town. Ukrainian and Belarusian are the closest languages, as together with Russian they form the East Slavic group of languages. Then conversation is intelligible 100%. ????? Vitebsk State University. > Much of the claimed intelligibility was simply bilingual learning. Some comments on Ukrainian: Like a shits to o. Lemko is spoken heavily in Poland, and it differs from Standard Rusyn in that it has a lot of Polish vocabulary, whereas Standard Rusyn has more influences from Hungarian and Romanian. Later I found out that Slovenian and Bulgarian/Macedonian are all south Slavic languages while Serbian language is actually a western Slavic language like Slovak/Czech/Polish. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world. They are essentially speaking the same language. Communication about such things is significantly impaired at this level. Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). 5%? Method: It is important to note that the percentages are in general only for oral intelligibility and only in the case of a situation of a pure inherent intelligibility test. Ive watched that movie on a croatian television with the croatian subtitle and understood that movie much much better, though Croatian also has a little differences. Bratislava speakers say that Kosice speech sounds half Slovak and half Ukrainian and uses many odd and unfamiliar words. But thats politics for you. But despite similarities in grammar and vocabulary and almost identical alphabets, they differ sharply in many ways and are not mutually intelligible. Because of all of this, tokavian speaker has a hard time understanding fast talking akavian speakers. Test only Serbs who know almost no English (they exist in older generation). 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. Eastern Slovak has ~80% intelligibility of Rusyn. I kind of like it though . [5][6] In a similar vein, some claim that mutual intelligibility is, ideally at least, the primary criterion separating languages from dialects.[7]. If you choose to learn a language which is at least to some extent mutually intelligible to a language you already know . Basically, you only hear a series of consonants with hardly recognizable vowels. 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. Sorry for my English, Im still learning itespecially right word order. Intelligibility may be 85%. When there, they have to pass a language test. Serbs did not have the same language contact with the Macedonian language as Macedonians with Serbocroatian did. It is just a dialect in east Slovakia that westernd Slovaks (and Czechs) find harder to understand but it is not like they would not understand a word. Ni Torlak has six vowels the standard /a e i o u/ and a reduced schwa // thats found where a strong yer once used to be, as in dog and sadness (this vowel has merged with /a/ in Serbian, but the two yers were kept as separate reflexes /e o/ (merging with those full vowels) in Macedonian) with phonemic and morpho-lexical stress that has plenty of grammatically conditioned shifts. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc, or its affiliates. Nobody Ive ever talked to that lived in Serbia had anything other than [u] for //. Spanish is most mutually intelligible with Galician. I was surprised that they never live in Slovenia and they never learn Slovenian. Probably, ja u da radim for Bosnians and Croatians sounds very Serbian. Saris Slovak has high but not complete intelligibility of Polish, possibly 85%. Here are the estimates about inteligebility with other Slavic languages from a person thats fluent in Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian: So, i've been interested about how much Polish speakers can understand Ukrainian without learning the language, but, most results i found said it's not really mutually intelligible, despite sharing alot or some words. pouv cyrilici, a bantsk norma, kter pouv latinku. 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. Personal communication. For instance, Portuguese and Spanish have a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility, but theyre technically separate languages. Some famous linguists who are acquaintances of mine (they have Wikipedia pages) told me that they thought that 90% was a good metric. In this week's Slavic languages comparison, we talk about animals in Polish and Ukrainian. The Mutually Intelligible Languages of 8 Popular World Languages 1. However, in recent years, there has also been quite a bit of bilingual learning. Polish is the most incomprehensible Slavic language for other Slavs, both spoken and written. The Macedonian spoken near the Serbian border is heavily influenced by Serbo-Croatian and is quite a bit different from the Macedonian spoken towards the center of Macedonia. demonstratives (tk~ovd vs. tuka~ovde, tamo vs. tamu) and some elementary adverbs (sg vs. sega now; jutre vs. utre tomorrow; dns(ke) ~ deneska today, fera vs. vera yesterday) are fairly similar; Ni Torlak uses multiple sets of demonstratives as its 3rd person pronouns (toj/ta/to/ti/te/ta, onj/on/on/on/on/on, ovj/ov/ov/ov/ov/ov, in descending order of frequency) as opposed to Serbians almost exclusive use of on/ona/ono/oni/one/ona and standard Macedonians use of toj/taa/toa/tie It is not intelligible with Shtokavian, although this is controversial. 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%. Hello, can you tell me, how much Kajkavian can your average Chakavian speaker understand in percentage? I will tell you also this: Finally, understanding mutual intelligibility gives you helpful insight into the history of a language. Is Russian and Polish Mutually Intelligible? Belarussian is nonetheless a separate language from both Ukrainian and Russian. Instead Eastern Lach and Western Lach have difficult intelligibility and are separate languages, so Lach itself is a macrolanguage. A Serb gave me this information. Slovak students do not have to pass a language test at Czech universities. 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). English professor. non-Shtokavian dialects: Kajkavian, Chakavian and Torlakian) diverge more significantly from all four normative varieties. Ive been following this page and kept coming to it for the past months, actually more than a year (and have noticed some updates). Lach is a Czech-Polish transitional lect with a close relationship with Cieszyn Silesian. Apart lack of understandability there are phrases that could be ill understood with famous Polish I am looking for the broom I can easily translate the first two sentences: Bulgarian is the oldest documented Slavic language. 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. Polish: Ukrainian and Belarusian (both partially; moreover, . Regular speech is generally quite fast. You can pick out the common words like Voda (water), Hleb (bread), zima (cold) and so forth but it is tough to get the jist of what they are saying with out more immersion. This list focuses on common languages widely thought to be at least partially and mutually intelligible. 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. Also what is a dialect and what is a language? becomes confusing for me since I can say a sentence in Kai/Cha thats almost the same in Slovene but different in BSCM standards. Do you speak Boyko or Hutsul? Slovenian language might be closer to the Macedonian/Bulgarian than to the Serbian language. But other results that included Czech and Bulgarian were very poor. (j/k) This is the first time that this has been done using just . Part of the problem between Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian is that so many of the basic words be, do, this, that, where are different, however, much of the rest of the vocabulary is the same. 5 (2): 135146. I have no idea, what Sledva da se otbelei, e tova means. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in . It is also said that West Slovak (Bratislava) cannot understand East Slovak, so Slovak may actually two different languages, but this is controversial. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? Portuguese has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with Spanish, Galician, French and Italian. This is simply reality in Serbia today. Nevertheless, the ISO has recently accepted a proposal from the Kajkavian Renaissance Association to list the Kajkavian literary language written from the 1500s-1900 as a recognized language with an ISO code of kjv. While not usually considered mutually intelligible, theres also enough similarity between French and Italian that speakers of Portuguese may understand both of these languages. Molise Croatian is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. However, the Torlak Serbians can understand Macedonian well, as this is a Serbo-Croatian dialect transitional to both languages. Serbo-Croatian has only 20% intelligibility of Ukrainian. Is Ukrainian closer to Russian or Polish? Russians, they usually need some adaptation time (and of course they need to be willing to try -- which is not always the case, since many Russians are monolingual and . I am not saying this to slam Ukrainians, but just an observation. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? Russian has a decent intelligibility with Bulgarian, possibly on the order of 50%, but Bulgarian intelligibility of Russian seems lower. Learning a language becomes fun and easy when you learn with movie trailers, music videos, news and inspiring talks. 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. 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). More? Serbians often say radiu and its very similar to Croatian raditi u or radit u, but sometimes Serbians say ja u da radim or even u da radim without ja (I), because u is first singular form of the verb hteti and ja is needless, but its very rare and common for southern Serbian dialects and also very very irregular in official Serbian, but that is very similar to official Macedonian. Therefore I would go with 25%. It has many Hungarian words, archaic Slavic words and words of an unknown origin (at least to me). This is also true of vocabulary and other aspects. You cant honestly believe that 19 hijackers from Saudi Arabia armed only with boxcutters where able to attack US biggest most powerful landmarks given all the hard factual evidence not including things like thermite or if a missile hit the Pentagon or other junk like that. However, Dutch speakers usually understand more German than the reverse because they study German in school. Thanks so much for this post. In writing, however, Scots language looks similar to English (albeit with some spelling variations). If you know Polish, you're likely to understand a little Russian, Ukrainian and other Slavic languages, but this doesn't mean that the languages are mutually intelligible. Bulgarian more comprehensible than standard Ukrainian. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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. Feb 22, 2020. I have read a book from Fraenkel/Kramer I believe or something similar, which said (according to some empiry) that Macedonians were easily switching to Serbian in comparison to Slovenes who stuck to their language in the time of Yugoslavia. 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. You also have these words? Interesting when one considers that Ukrainians do not even consider Rusyn a real language. Do you speak Ukrainian. There was a lot of past Yugoslav politics that hid the truth. Slovenian: 20% And when islanders respond back in akavian they are puzzled: What? Ukrainians can understand Russian much better than the other way around. I use Wikipedia as a reference for new languages that Wikipedia misses, like the 4 Croatian languages. [2], Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible,[3] although there are also similarities among different sign languages. Another similar example would be varieties of Arabic, which additionally share a single prestige variety in Modern Standard Arabic. One more thing is that Serbian has, for example, two versions of the future case, with da (that) and verb in some person form, 1st in this case: ja u da radim (I will work) and ja u raditi where raditi (to work) is an infinitive.