Hag_Boulder 9 mo. 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. Ukrainian and Belarusian are pretty much mutually intelligible (source: I am a poet in Belarusian, I go to poetry festivals in Belarus quite often and there are no interpreters for the Ukrainian poets invited to international events). Far Northeastern Slovak (Saris Slovak) near the Polish border is close to Polish and Ukrainian. I think Robert has done articles on 9/11 conspiracy theories and their level of crediblity, yeah. Many Ukrainian-speakers consider the language . Ukrainian and Russian are today closer than they were a hundred years ago due to Soviet Russification, and somewhat mutually intelligiblespeakers in Ukraine often switch back and forth from one . Balgarskijat ezik e pluricentrien ezik ima njakolko kniovni normi. We speak them too. All Rights Reserved. With Lonely Planet's Ukrainian Phrasebook, let no barriers . Regarding Polish and Russian there are many words with opposite meaning. For example, British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) are quite different and mutually unintelligible, even though the hearing people of the United Kingdom and the United States share the same spoken language. 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. Vedle hlavn, pouvan v Bulharsku, existuje jet makedonsk norma, kter tak (?) 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). 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! Can you give me a figure for how much of a Bulgarian text you can understand? Is there an agreed-upon standard? 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. Can a Russian speaker understand Polish? 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? I once had a conversation with a young woman from the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, most Bulgarians over the age of 30-35 understand Russian well since studying Russian was mandatory under Communism. But akavian being archaic it has old slavic package. Was he educated? I am not saying this to slam Ukrainians, but just an observation. For instance, he and she in Standard Macedonia is toj and taa respectively, very close to Bulgarian toy and tya. I thought this is Croatia! . Polish uses Latin letters, just like English. Belarussian almost completely comprehensible, except a few words. However, my girlfriend never ever says these words and rather uses on and ona just like in Serbian. This list focuses on common languages widely thought to be at least partially and mutually intelligible. I got that figure from a Serb. I can understand anyone who speaks English, even those who speak it as foreigners might say too fast. Spoken Bulgarian is very difficult to understand for other Slavs due to phonology and unique syllable stress. 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 . Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian have 10-15% oral intelligibility, however, there are Bulgarian dialects that are transitional with Torlak Serbian. 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. Mutual intelligibility also occurs in a wide variety of degrees, ranging from none, to partial, to full mutual intelligibility. Hutch Mon May 14, 2007 12:25 am GMT. Download: Bulgarian and Russian are close because the Ottoman rulers of Bulgaria would not allow printing in Bulgaria. 15), Part II", "Intelligibility of standard German and Low German to speakers of Dutch", "Cross-Border Intelligibility on the Intelligibility of Low German among Speakers of Danish and Dutch", "Mutual intelligibility of Dutch-German cognates by humans and computers", "Morpho-syntax of mutual intelligibility in the Turkic languages of Central Asia - Surrey Morphology Group", "Kirundi language, alphabet and pronunciation", "Tokelauan Language Information & Resources", "Majlis Bahasa Brunei Darussalam Indonesia Malaysia (MABBIM)", "Indonesian-Malay mutual intelligibility? Mutual intelligibilityrefers to whether speakers of one language can understand speakers of another language. People observing conversation between Cieszyn Silesian and Upper Silesian report that they have a hard time understanding each other. Re: Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian Mutual Intelligibility. However, many groups of languages are partly mutually intelligible, i.e. http://www.network54.com/Forum/84302/thread/1289113786/last-1289113786/British+intelligence+links+to+African+Emabssy+bombings. Serbians and Bosnians not so such. To some extent, Russian, Rusyn, Ukrainian, and Belarusian retain a degree of mutual intelligibility. Like a shits to o. Serbs/Croats used to live in the south Poland and they moved south to the current location. In this case, another criteria I would also consider is how hard or easy it is for a Serb to start understanding Macedonian. I myself who have learned some Macedonian, pick up much more words from spoken Serbo-Croatian than spoken Bulgarian. She didnt have any problem following. How mutually intelligible are Slavic languages? : r/linguistics - reddit 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. Belarussian is nonetheless a separate language from both Ukrainian and Russian. If one takes the transitional dialects which make a triangle between Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, one can say that it is also one language. 0%? The claim for separate languages is based more on politics than on linguistic science. Bulgarian is similar to Macedonian but with more different cyrillic. 2023 Enux Education Limited. This is great. between Ni Torlak and Macedonian than between either of those two and Serbian At least not in general if so, it might depend on the school. While Norway was under Danish rule, the Bokml written standard of Norwegian developed from Dano-Norwegian, a koin language that evolved among the urban elite in Norwegian cities during the later years of the union. adrian. He conducts his interviews in Macedonian, and as you can watch , his guests, be they bulgarians, serbs, bosnians, croats have no trouble understanding his questions. There is an old Kajkavian-Chakavian dialect continuum of which little remains, although some of the old Kajkavian-Chakavian transitional dialects are still spoken (Jembrigh 2014). I also have formal training in several Slavic languages, which make most of them, except some of the Balkan ones, pretty much comprehensibe to me. Pretty accurate I think. Then tokavian person reaction would be: What? 5 (2): 135146. Save. In recent years, many of the German words are falling out of use and being replaced by Polish words, especially by young people. Also akavian has some elements of its own. ", "Moldovan (limba moldoveneasc / )", "Experimental methods for measuring intelligibility of closely related language varieties", "Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe", Harold Schiffman, "Linguists' Definition: mutual intelligibility", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mutual_intelligibility&oldid=1137818628, Articles with incomplete citations from May 2015, Pages with login required references or sources, Articles needing additional references from July 2022, All articles needing additional references, Wikipedia articles needing factual verification from March 2015, Articles with self-published sources from April 2020, Articles with dead external links from December 2021, Articles with unsourced statements from April 2018, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Kajkavian has higher mutual intelligibility with Slovene than with the national varieties of Shtokavian. It was for me a bit strange, because Bulgarian science still supports the thesis that Macedonian is Bulgarian. My gues. Briefly put, mutual intelligibility is when speakers of one language can understand a related language to some degree. With this, off I go to sleep. I can illustrate it on the video posted above Vojnata vo Bosna. The reason that these languages seem to be mutually intelligible is because almost all Ukrainians are bilingual anyway, and capable of switching between the two at will. Are Russian and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? - Quora Bashkirs - Russia's Periphery cheers Yet, it is closer to Russian that standard Ukrainian. some things in this article are heavily exaggerated. Southern Slovak on the Hungarian border has a harder time understanding Polish because they do not hear it much. Russian is actually a little further, but most Belarusian speakers are bilingual (Bel-Rus) and most Ukrainian . In Czech rep. Slovaks dont have to pass any language exams (the other foreigner do have to). Czech and Slovak are simply dialects of this one tongue. However, you do say later in the text that What Are Mutually Intelligible Languages? The Answer, and - FluentU Because so many Slavic languages are national languages, they tend to have pretty big populations. 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. 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). Belarussian has 80% intelligibility of Ukrainian and 55% of Polish. Its often said that all Slavic languages are mutually intelligible with each other. I cannot understand that much of kajkavski nor akavski, but I can understand more akavski than I can kajkavski. When we do intelligiblity studies, we look for virgin ears or people who have not heard the other language much or at all. The Lemko dialect of Rusyn has only marginal intelligibility with Ukrainian. FluentU brings a language to life with real-world videos. Vitebsk State University. Many Poles insist that Silesian is a Polish dialect, but this is based more on politics than reality. 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. Macedonian syntax and lexics are more similar to Serbian, even though structures of the language such as articles (no declensions) function as in Bulgarian. In this week's Slavic languages comparison we talk about animals in Polish and Ukrainian. Russian. When it is relatively symmetric, it is characterized as "mutual". Robert Lindsay, Independent Journalist: l Talk about Things You're Not Supposed to Talk About. There was a lot of past Yugoslav politics that hid the truth. These three languages have an 86% lexical similarity; that is, they share 86% of the same words. Being fluent in Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian gives you access to understanding more of other Slavic languages. Regular speech is generally quite fast. Linguistic distance is the relative degree of difference between languages or dialects. Jembrigh, Mario. Upper Dnistrian is influenced by German and Polish. For me having learnt some Slavic languages and watching Bulgarian TV was not very difficult. Maybe I could offer you somehow help? . Eastern Slovak may have 72% intelligibility of Ukrainian. Score: 4.1/5 (74 votes) . 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. Mutual intelligibility of Russian and Ukrainian - Factual Questions It is not intelligible with Shtokavian, although this is controversial. An academic paper has been published making the case for a separate Balachka language. Its spelling, however, is quite different from any of them. Some famous linguists who are acquaintances of mine (they have Wikipedia pages) told me that they thought that 90% was a good metric. Ukrainians seems closer to Slovak than Russian but some words in Russian are almost exactly the same in Slovak but in Ukranian they are completely different. . Feb 22, 2020. So I understand Kajkavians and Slovenes except for a germanic package. Russia Invades Ukraine pt XII. Why not look em up on his site. Huchon, Mireille, Histoire de la langue franaise, pages 214 and 223. Accent is on last or penultimate syllable. I also worked in a resteraunt with lots of west and south slavs there and I have to say that Serbian and crotian has a lot of ilarities with Slovak. I see your point, and I agree: there must be a difference in method when determining linguistic intelligibility based on different populations. Slovenian: 20% 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. 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. Having lived in Moscow and being married to a Russian, I now speak Russian well enough to be mistaken for a Russian-speaking tourist from Poland or Lithuania when in Moscow. WORD. Good post, OP. The dialects of Ukrainian do not differ extensively from one another and are all mutually intelligible. Czech-Slovak is now 91%, Czech-Serbo-Croatian is 18%, Czech-Macedonian is 17% and Czech=-Bulgarian is 13%. In the case of Croatian and Slovene, the intelligibility is asymmetric, since Slovene participants could understand Croatian better than vice versa. Kids speak both languages, as well as English, fluently. Swarte will be awarded a PhD by the University of Groningen on 3 March. 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: In the Kievan Rus', Russian and Ukrainian were dialects of the same language, meaning that they were largely mutually intelligible with only minor vocabulary or grammatical differences. Go back to your kennel. That barrier, however, is not too difficult to overcome. Re: Cz/Slo Paul McGrane. This makes Polish a much much easier language to learn than Russian. 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. 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. wovel a shifts to o not shits hahhaha sorry. 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. Bulgarian has 80% intelligibility of Macedonian, 41% of Russian, and 5% of Polish and Czech. Ponaszymu also has many Germanisms which have been falling out of use lately, replaced by their Czech equivalents. Polish and Ukrainian mutual intelligibility question. Bulgarian: 15% spoken , 30-40% written Belarusian is, in a sense, in between other slavic languages. Speakers of the Torlak dialect (any Torlak dialect) understand Serbo-Croation, Macedonian and Bulgarian with no problem, and can comprehand Slovenian as much as 80-90% within a few weeks of exposure. pouv cyrilici, a bantsk norma, kter pouv latinku. Its predecessor stage is known in Western academia as Ruthenian (14th to 17th centuries), in turn descended from what is referred to in modern linguistics as Old East Slavic (10th to 13th centuries). Also cyrillic in Macedonian is almost as same as Serbian, but many Croats dont know or dont want to know cyrillic, and that makes Macedonian more different to them than to Serbs. December 2014. 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. 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. BR, Hello, the difference of course is completely arbitrary, but above 90%, most speakers regard their comprehension as full or say things like I understand it completely. Below 90%, it starts getting a lot more iffy, and down towards 80-85%, people start saying things like, I understand most of it but not all! and people start regarding the other tongue as possibly a separate language. 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. 1996 . They understand almost nothing. 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. Polish is spoken outside of Poland by Polish diaspora groups in countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom. I simply didnt know what for example word iskati (to seek) means when I first watched that movie, I was 14, I understand it from the context like I can understand Macedonian.