Not true about Czech / Slovak inteligibility. Nevertheless Ukrainian intelligibility of Russian is hard to calculate because presently there are few Ukrainians in Ukraine who do not speak Russian. These 4 main Polish dialects are: Greater Polish, which is spoken in the west of the country. some things in this article are heavily exaggerated. I can randomly pick up another paragraph from that Wikipedia page, and it would be harder: Linguistic distance is the name for the concept of calculating a measurement for how different languages are from one another. Despite all of this, Ukrainian and Russian aren't the closest languages in the Slavic language family, and they're not even mutually intelligible. It was formerly thought to be a Slovenian dialect, but some now think it is more properly a Kajkavian dialect. Im a speaker of Torlakian Serbian characteristically closer to Macedonian than Standard Serbian, having three (nom/acc/voc) cases and using a fusional instead of an analytic past tense and, with regards to a certain comment made two years ago on here, can, without issue, understand Zona Zamfirova, a movie about life in Ottoman Ni, without any subtitles. There was a lot of past Yugoslav politics that hid the truth. He estimated that Belarusian and Ukrainian were at least 80% mutually intelligible, accents and dialect aside, and that Russian was far . The President outlines the role played by a former London public schoolboy, Omar Sheikh, in the kidnap and murder of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, in February 2002. Spoken Bulgarian is very difficult to understand for other Slavs due to phonology and unique syllable stress. I also met Croats from Zagreb that never learn Slovenian or live in Slovenia and I thought they are native Slovenian speakers because they can speak Slovenian perfectly. Much of the language has changed lots of Turkish loans have been dropped, plenty of standard Serbian terminology has made its way in but Ive had less of a communication issue in Kumanovo (north-eastern Macedonia) than Belgrade (capital of Serbia) back when I was but a young lad. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in writing. Just one example: the letter g was eliminated in order to make the Ukrainian h correspond exactly with Russian g. Nevertheless, although intelligibility with Slovenian is high, Kajkavian lacks full intelligibility with Slovenian. That information is in error. I always aske her about whether she understands Bulgarian and Serbian and she claims Serbian is way closer to her language rather than Bulgarian. The biggest Slavic language by far is Russian, which has 154 million native speakers and over 258 million speakers in total. Slow, deliberate speech is not typical. Written intelligibility is higher at 25%. [2], Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible,[3] although there are also similarities among different sign languages. Everything else we chalk up to bilingual learning as we call it and we do not think it is accurate. In contrast, Filipovi is talking slowly, and although some words have a different stress than in Czech, I can identify them pretty well and hence listening to this guy is basically like reading a written text in Serbo-Croatian. Contents1 Can Slovenians understand Croatian?2 What languages are mutually intelligible with Croatian?3 What is the closest language to Slovenian?4 Which two . Here are the estimates about inteligebility with other Slavic languages from a person thats fluent in Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian: Slovenians have a very hard time understanding Poles and Czechs and vice versa. Could you please explain what you mean by language and intelligibility and hopefully remedy this failure of the original text? 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. . I will also say that it is a fact that a British intelligence linked terrorist Anas al-Liby recruited by MI6 to kill Gadaffi in 96 was involved in the African Embassy bombings. Thread starter Bamaro; Start date Feb 15, 2023 . Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in writing. What percentage of Ukraine speaks Polish? A western Slovak can even understand most of Ruthenians hen they are speaking. Macedonian and Bulgarian are fairly similar but they are not close to being fully mutually intelligible. 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. There are distinct regional variations of Arabic. Polish uses Latin letters, just like English. Understanding the connection between mutually intelligible languages, can make it easier to learn an additional language. 3. 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. Yes and if you could more than one listener, it would be great. Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family. 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-:) . Crazy! It is not true at all that Ukrainian and Russian are mutually intelligible, as Russian only has 50% intelligibility of Ukrainian. By the way, osnovnata (osnovna-ta) is related to the Czech word osnova (basis, outline). Silesian, which can be heard in the southwest (sometimes also considered a separate language). Yet its totally foreign to many in Croatia. The more German the Silesian dialect is, the harder it is for Poles to understand. Finally, I think the Ukrainians' mentality if more Polish, while the Russian mentality is more fourteenth century Mongol. Probably, ja u da radim for Bosnians and Croatians sounds very Serbian. I would be able to translate what he says! Now onto the discussion. Much of the claimed intelligibility between Czech and Slovak was simply bilingual learning. Additionally, Norwegian assimilated a considerable amount of Danish vocabulary as well as traditional Danish expressions. There is much nonsense floating around about Serbo-Croatian or Shtokavian. He was a member of a group of linguists who met periodically to discuss the field. I hope you will like it and will be useful for your researches! 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. slavic mutual newspaper Is there an agreed-upon standard? I see your point, and I agree: there must be a difference in method when determining linguistic intelligibility based on different populations. Hence, many religious books were imported from Russia, and these books influenced Bulgarian. 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). Good post, OP. But despite similarities in grammar and vocabulary and almost identical alphabets, they differ sharply in many ways and are not mutually intelligible. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. Sorry I can`t give you percentage. Czech and Slovak are more intelligible to me then Slovenian with Slovak more so then Czech. How do they arrive at these estimates? Czech: 10% 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. Western Slovak speakers say Eastern Slovak sounds idiotic and ridiculous, and some words are different, but other than that, they can basically understand it. Some comments on Ukrainian: True MI testing does try to find virgin ears that have heard little of the other language and speak little or none of it. This is also true of vocabulary and other aspects. It was a long time ago though, so Ill try to convince her (and maybe a couple more Russians) to try this again tonight. 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. I have had people give me personal estimates like 40%, 85%, 60-65%, 70%,10-15%, less than 1%, etc. However, Balachka is dying out and is now spoken only by a few old people. Czechs hardly ever study at Slovak universities. Is Ukrainian closer to Russian or Polish? Jeff Lindsay estimates that Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). . The diffete. However, many of these dialects are at least partially mutually intelligible. You must namely take into consideration that the mutual understanding depends on many things if you are LISTENING or READING, WHAT are people talking about, HOW FAST they are speaking, and even WHO is speaking. This is because colloquial Ukrainian is closer to the Ukrainian spoken in the Soviet era which had huge Russian influence. I can barely understand czech (slovak I havent tried) and, as similar as it is to croatian, I can only understand a little slovenian. 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. Eastern Slovak has ~80% intelligibility of Rusyn. Slovenians, Macedonians and Bulgars used to be one nation called Sklaveni and they were living in the south Hungary. This list focuses on common languages widely thought to be at least partially and mutually intelligible. What if akavian person is from dalmatian coastal village which is now half tokavised and tokavian speaker is from Dalmatian city which still has some elements of akavian, ikavian yat and is full of romanisms? Re: Cz/Slo Only Croatians try so hard to press differences. Some Poles say they find Silesian harder to understand than Belorussian or Slovak, which implies intelligibility of 20-25%. akavian is full of romanisms, kajkavian of germanisms and tokavian of turkish and other orientalisms. FluentU brings a language to life with real-world videos. Yet some say that the subtitles are simply put on as a political move due to Ukraines puristic language policy. The Rusyn language is composed of 50% Slovak roots and 50% Ukrainian roots, so some difficult intelligibility with Ukrainian might be expected. 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. Russian influence only ended in 1878. 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. I just didnt realize that when you talked about learning the other language you were actually referring to the errors inherent in doing a non-virgin ears MI study, and not conflating language learning with mutual intelligibility. In addition, political and social conventions often override considerations of mutual intelligibility in both scientific and non-scientific views. Ukrainian and Belarusian are the closest languages, as together with Russian they form the East Slavic group of languages. So I tried with my native Slovenian language and I was surprised how well Bulgars understand Slovenian language. 12 Dec 2016 #221. Additionally, some Arabic speakers may be familiar with Egyptian Arabic through the media, so they may rely on this to bridge any language gaps. Older people who rembember federation understand everything. 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. Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian have 10-15% oral intelligibility, however, there are Bulgarian dialects that are transitional with Torlak Serbian. Bulgarian and Russian are close because the Ottoman rulers of Bulgaria would not allow printing in Bulgaria. German is partially mutually intelligible with Yiddish and Dutch. Anti-Ethnic Sentiments However Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are not like Czech and Slovak. This is a Chakavian-Slovenian transitional lect that is hard to categorize, but it is usually considered to be a Slovenian dialect. 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? Its often said that Czechs and Poles can understand each other, but this is not so. Belarussian almost completely comprehensible, except a few words. My gues. Vedle hlavn, pouvan v Bulharsku, existuje jet makedonsk norma, kter tak (?) So they speak Macedonian to me and I speak Serbian to them, and we understand each other perfectly. 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). Polish: 5% JohnUK. Ukrainian and Russian only have 60% lexical similarity. Therefore I would go with 25%. However, any suggestions that Kajkavian is a separate language are censored on Croatian TV (Jembrigh 2014). Femke Swarte studied the mutual intelligibility of twenty Germanic language combinations. 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. ago. It forms a single tongue and is not several separate languages as many insist. 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. Not only are these Slavic languages very similar to Russian in written form, but they are also around 70% mutually intelligible. Polish is not intelligible with Kashubian, a language related to Polish spoken in the north of Poland. @jacobbauthumley 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. Check out his page on the FBI 10 most wanted website. pouv cyrilici, a bantsk norma, kter pouv latinku. Also, I can only understand a small bit of Russian, and Ukrainian is even more far off for me(the pronunciation is easier but understanding is harder) and I can understand quite a bit of bulgarian(especially when written). My email is on the Contact page. The Mutually Intelligible Languages of 8 Popular World Languages, What You Should Know About Mutually Intelligible Languages, The 11 Best Language Learning Apps of 2023, How to Say Thank You in 35 Different Languages Around the Globe, The Penny Pinchers Guide to Learning Any Language for Free, The Top 8 What Language Should I Learn Online Quizzes, The 6 Best Sources of Language Learning Videos on the Internet. 5 (2): 135146. This gives rise to claims of Macedonians being able to understand Serbo-Croatian very well, however, much of this may be due to bilingual learning. Are Russian and Polish mutually intelligible? Ukrainians and Belarusians understand each other's languages with no problem. @AJ Serbo-Croatian intelligibility of Slovenian is 25-30%. For example the word najgolemata (the biggest) written in Serbian latin means najvea in Serbian, but I somehow know what golem/golema means, but when I hear this ta (definite article) in the end of the word, that sounds Macedonian to me more than golema, prefix naj (makes superlative form) is the same in Serbian. 40% of Silesian vocabulary is different from Polish, mostly Germanisms. Far Northeastern Slovak (Saris Slovak) near the Polish border is close to Polish and Ukrainian. Your email address will not be published. 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. But which languages in the world are actually closest to . At least not in general if so, it might depend on the school. Slobozhan Russian is very close to Ukrainian, closer to Ukrainian than it is to Russian, and Slobozhan Ukrainian is very close to Russian, closer to Russian than to Ukrainian. Zona Zamfirova is the movie in a Serbian dialect, but I dont understand it as same as I dont understand Macedonian or even more so, that is more like Bulgarian with the hard vowels. About the mistakes I would say that Macedonian is about 25% intelligible to a Serbian speaker that was never exposed to Macedonian. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? Ukranian: 20% 2. People from Lviv and larger cities and towns in western Ukraine have a slight clipped accent but they speak standard Ukrainian. I think that nowadays people from Ni also dont understand that Serbian enough. I will also send you a copy so you can look over the Serbo-Croatian part and tell me if there are any errors. ", "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. Dont let the past politics fool you. Glad to hear you are steering clear of it. Actually the way it is spoken sometimes sounds more like Slovak to me than Czech or polish does, however past really basic speech it is pretty hard to understand. In terms In fact, some say the intelligibility between the two is near zero. Many Ukrainian-speakers consider the language . Macedonain and Serbo-Croatian being 25% inteligible is simply not true. Serbo-Croatian and Russian have 10-15% intelligibility, if that, yet written intelligibility is higher at 25%. 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. 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. Here are three critical ways in which Bulgarian and Russian speakers differ. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc, or its affiliates. What language is this? English professor. I tested this on my wife by showing her news clips on Youtube. Because so many Slavic languages are national languages, they tend to have pretty big populations. 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. 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. They are native Kajkavian speakers and this is another proof that Kajkavian is actually Slovenian. The idea is that the Kajkavian and Chakavian languages simply do not exist, though obviously they are both separate languages. Pannonian Rusyn is spoken by a group of Rusyns who migrated to northwestern Serbia (the Bachka region in Vojvodina province) and Eastern Croatia from Eastern Slovakia and Western Ukraine 250 years ago. However, you do say later in the text that I was born in Upper State and I can barely understand some southern speakers.Do you think the politics in USA is also preventing the formation of new languages ? Russian is followed by Polish with over 40 million speakers, Ukrainian with 33 million and Czech with 13 million. Conclusion: These recommendations are based on research into the mutual intelligibility of Germanic languages, conducted by Femke Swarte. Score: 4.1/5 (68 votes) . How much Slovene can your average Chakavian speaker understand? Mutually Intelligible And Different. Complaints have been made that many of these percentages were simply wild guesses with no science behind them. Russian has high intelligibility of Belarussian, on the order of 75%. Spanish is most mutually intelligible with Galician. Its historical development consists of four main periods. But then it is difficult. More properly, their speech is best seen as closer to Macedonian than to Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian. Mi priamo Hrvatski jezik in neotokavian. The historical development is characterized by four main periods. When we do intelligiblity studies, we look for virgin ears or people who have not heard the other language much or at all. [2] As a consequence, spoken mutual intelligibility is not reciprocal. He is currently listed on the FBIs Most Wanted Terrorists list. Macedonian: 50-60 % Slovenian: 20% It should be noted that this division is conditional (actually: arbitrary) (and) names do not reflect the different languages, but only periods in the development of the Bulgarian language, which (have) detectable traits. It is an official language of the Bulgarian republic and one of 23 official languages of the European Union. In brief, there is some mutual intelligibility, enough to have a simple conversation of the 'me Tarzan - you Jane' type, speakin. Thank you. But thats politics for you. How much of Ukrainian can these Russians in Canada understand? 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. Interesting article Czech has 82% intelligibility of Slovak (varies from 70-95%), 12% of Polish and 5% of Russian and Bulgarian. Polish is spoken outside of Poland by Polish diaspora groups in countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Bolgarian 30 % spoken, 50 % written Usually, they can even write their theses in Slovak. I will tell you also this: In addition, the Slobozhan dialects of Ukrainian and Russian such as (Slobozhan Ukrainian and Slobozhan Russian) spoken in Kantemirov (Voronezhskaya Oblast, Russia), and Kuban Russian or Balachka spoken in the Kuban area right over the eastern border of Ukraine are very close to each other. However, many groups of languages are partly mutually intelligible, i.e.