It is also said that West Slovak (Bratislava) cannot understand East Slovak, so Slovak may actually two different languages, but this is controversial. Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). In fact, many Macedonians are switching away from the Macedonian language towards Serbo-Croatian. Give me a figure in % for the Rusyn if you would. I met Croats from Zagreb and they speak Slovenian perfectly. Macedonian and Bulgarian would be much closer together except that in recent years, Macedonian has been heavily influenced by Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian has been heavily influenced by Russian. Therefore I would go with 25%. Is Ukrainian closer to Russian or Polish? He said he is frequent visitor in Poland and therefore he speaks Polish. Polish is the most incomprehensible Slavic language for other Slavs, both spoken and written. Ukrainian is a lineal descendant of the colloquial language used in Kievan Rus (10th-13th century). 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. The revelation comes from General Musharrafs memoir, In the Line of Fire, which begins serialisation in The Times today and will further embarrass the White House at a time when relations between the US and Pakistan are already strained.. Pakistani intelligence chiefs are concerned that General Musharraf may jeopardise their relationship with British intelligence agencies after claiming that a convicted terrorist was once an MI6 informer. When Kievan Rus' fell to the Mongols in the 13th century, the formerly united states became split, and what were once very closely-related dialects began to . The real reason that Slavs cant even understand each other: not enough vowels in their tongues! And the 25% is very low. Every major language has some dialects Also both sides are able to use standard Slovak. That word have special meaning and I think that Serbian needs that word, but if I tell that word seriously while I speak, everybody will laugh at me. Although even if they stuck to Polish/Ukrainian, they'd probably still understand each other. 70%? You also have these words? In fact, I would probably have a hard time to understand a Czech speaking with such an intonation. What I took as Czech speaking Czech language, which I perfectly understand, was actually Czech who tries to speaks Polish. When you find out it is a separate language, you ask for %, and they often tell you! However, it appears to be a separate language, as Lach is not even intelligible within itself. Your email address will not be published. The intelligibility of Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian is highly controversial, and intelligibility studies are in order. Usually, they can even write their theses in Slovak. Score: 4.1/5 (74 votes) . 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? Im The Lizard King, I Can Do Anything! It is rather controversial outside Linguistics, as you run into nationalists and other fools who emotionally distort things. As a native of Ni, I can say that the Serbo-CroatianMacedonian figures might be roughly on-point. Additionally, some Arabic speakers may be familiar with Egyptian Arabic through the media, so they may rely on this to bridge any language gaps. According to former Pakistani President Musharraf Omar Sheikh who wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta was recruited during the 90s by British intelligence. But reading a Bulgarian text is surprisingly easy, because the phonology and vocabulary are very similar. We found that Czech and Slovak have by far the highest level of mutual intelligibility, followed by Croatian and Slovene. However, many of these dialects are at least partially mutually intelligible. 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. (Download). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1n9KMawa-8 The Answer, and Examples for 8 World Languages. Despite all of this, Ukrainian and Russian aren't the closest languages in the Slavic language family, and they're not even mutually intelligible. JohnUK. A professor of Slavic Linguistics at a university in Bulgaria reviewed the paper and felt that the percentages were accurate. So here you have a case, when I could not understand everything, but I could grasp the meaning (at least). Then tokavian person reaction would be: What? I must confess that as a Czech, I understand only little, what the Macedonian reporter is saying, and when I was listening to the first guy from Bosnia (Izetbegovi), I was often lost, understanding only slightly more, maybe 20-30%. No, you cannot. Russian is partially mutually intelligible with Ukrainian, Rusyn and Belarusian. Frequency of exposure is one of the main causes of this. Hence, Russians understand the colloquial Ukrainian spoken in the countryside pretty well, but they understand the modern standard heard on TV much less. The overall lexical similarity between Spanish and Portuguese is estimated to be 89%. do is the same verb (prim/pri/pri/primo/prite/pre vs. pravam/pravi/pravi/pravime/pravite/pravaat; as opposed to Serbian raditi) A question: how is it decided that the cut-off between a language and dialect is 90% MI? The reason there are subtitles on Russian-language shows in Ukraine is because of Ukraines puristic state language policies. Slovak-Czech MI tests out at 82% in studies, which seems about right. On the other side, i.e. Thank you very much for this. I have to really focus and try hard to understand them but with patience I can get buy. In the evening of the first day it reaches 93%, in a week 95%, all unsupervised, almost effortlessly, just by being there, watching, listening, talking and asking for an explanation here and there. 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. Furthermore, there is a dialect continuum between Kajkavian and Chakavian as there is between Kajkavian and Slovenian, and lects with a dialect continuum between them are always separate languages. "A New Methodology for Romance Classification". Polish uses Latin letters, just like English. Cheers brothers and sisters! I could try. Nice article, but I think there is a difference between spoken mutual intelligibility and different languages. Recently a Croatian linguist forwarded a proposal to formally recognize Chakavian as a separate language, but the famous Croatian Slavicist Radoslav Katii argued with him about this and rejected the proposal on political, not linguistic grounds. 60%? Russian influence only ended in 1878. Around year 550 Slovenians went west and Macedonians/Bulgars went south. This comment is fantastic! As a native Serbian speaker from Bosnia who has interacted with most Slavic languages , heres my breakdown of level of mutual intelligibility with other Slavic tongues: its not based on bilingual learning. In addition, political and social conventions often override considerations of mutual intelligibility in both scientific and non-scientific views. President Musharraf of Pakistan says that the CIA has secretly paid his government millions of dollars for handing over hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects to America.. However, lexical similarity focuses on exclusively overlapping vocabulary to determine similarity between languages. Intelligibility between Balachka and Ukrainian is not known. It is very strange when some words are not understood, although the communication is possible. The historical development is characterized by four main periods. Yes, there are some words, which has Ukraine origins, but trust me that its not so hard to understand. Classifications may also shift for reasons external to the languages themselves. plenty of prepositions are used in a similar, if not identical, manner; to name an example, na is used in both Macedonian and Ni Torlak as a replacement for the Serbian genitive, in addition to its standard use as on(to) And o shifts to u. You are probably talking about the study Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages? Bulgarian is a pluricentric language it has several literary norms. Bratislava speakers say that Kosice speech sounds half Slovak and half Ukrainian and uses many odd and unfamiliar words. 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. pouv cyrilici, a bantsk norma, kter pouv latinku. It is difficult to get a high-paying job that requires skill and . Thanks so much for this post. 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. The only big one i disagree with your breakdown is serbian/croatian vs bulgarian. I have no problems understanding the Torlakian dialect. Swarte will be awarded a PhD by the University of Groningen on 3 March. Generally, when foreigners say speakers of a certain language speak too fast, speakers of that language can hear that fast speech just fine. However Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are not like Czech and Slovak. The Serbo-Croatian vocabulary in both Macedonian and Torlakian is very similar, stemming from the political changes of 1912; whereas these words have changed more in Bulgarian. 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. Here are the estimates about inteligebility with other Slavic languages from a person thats fluent in Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian: 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. The key problem of Bulgarian is the different gramar the lack of declination and the use of postpositive articles. It shows that Macedonians indeed grew up to certain extent as bilingual Macedonian-Serbian. At least not in general if so, it might depend on the school. Usually, theyre at least partially mutually intelligible with the main language they stem from. Shtokavian is simply the same Serbo-Croatian language that is also spoken in Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia. So I understood all but one word (), and Google Translator indeed confirms that my guess was right and it means also. I am really sorry, but if you are speaking about science, you cannot just say. Anti-Ethnic Sentiments 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. Salute from Czech republic. 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. Was he educated? After all, you can look at the study that I listed above and check the results of the written translation task (translation of 50 individual words), which illustrates the similarity of lexicons: Czechs best understand Slovak words (96,52%), then Polish (64,29%), then Bulgarian (57,00%), Croatian (55,38%) and Slovene (49,73%). 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. I would say that Macedonian is about 25% intelligible to a Serbian speaker that was never exposed to Macedonian. In fact, people in the north of Poland regard Silesian as incomprehensible. Kajkavski it seems has changed less than akavski. Yes of course. 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. 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. Chakavian has 82% intelligibility of Kajkavian. It depends which dialect. Polish 5 % spoken, 20 % written Once you pick up those basic 50 words, understanding Macedonian becomes super easy that was my experience with Macedonian friends (the few of them who dont speak Serbian). Interesting when one considers that Ukrainians do not even consider Rusyn a real language. @AJ Mutual intelligibility also occurs in a wide variety of degrees, ranging from none, to partial, to full mutual intelligibility. Some reports say there is difficult intelligibility between Ekavian Chakavian in the north and Ikavian Chakavian in the far south, but speakers of Labin Ekavian in the far north say they can understand the Southeastern Istrian speech of the southern islands very well (Jembrigh 2014). The translation is not very problematic. Even the basic words are almost the same. Ukrainian and Belarusian are mutually intelligible and in general very close and have some common features like synthetical future, but Russian speakers (who know only Russian) only partially understand Ukrainian/Belarusian. Other Western Slovak speakers (Bratislava) say that Eastern Slovak (Kosice) is hard to understand. 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. 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. Belarussian and Ukrainian have 85% similar vocabulary. In addition, Balachka language associations believe it is a separate language. Eastern Slovak may have 72% intelligibility of Ukrainian. Serbs did not have the same language contact with the Macedonian language as Macedonians with Serbocroatian did. The only (still rather minor) problem that I had with this text was the part Nared s osnovnata, izpolzovana v Balgarija (Together with the basic norm used in Bulgaria), because I could not understand Nared s osnovnata. In terms of pronunciation, Ukrainian or Southeastern Yiddish can be considered to occupy an intermediate position between Northeastern and Central Yiddish. The Mutually Intelligible Languages of 8 Popular World Languages 1. The languages really split about 1,000 years ago, but written Slovak was based on written Czech, and there was a lot of interlingual communication. 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. Spanish has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with Galician, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Sardinian and French. I am afraid you are not right because if you take Serbian dialects till Nis, then they are very mutually intelligible with Macedonian! I think that nowadays people from Ni also dont understand that Serbian enough. The results: So they speak Macedonian to me and I speak Serbian to them, and we understand each other perfectly. If youve studied one language, you may very well understand some of anotheror have a much easier time learning it. There was a lot of past Yugoslav politics that hid the truth. Ukrainians can understand Russian much better than the other way around. The Aegean Macedonian dialects mostly spoken in Greece, such as the Lerinsko-Kostursko and Solunsko-Vodenskadialects, sound more Bulgarian than Macedonian. Ukrainian and Russian only have 60% lexical similarity. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? Nared s osnovnata, izpolzovana v Balgarija, saestvuvat oe makedonska norma, kojato sao izpolzva kirilica, i banatska norma, kojata izpolzva latinica. 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. I myself who have learned some Macedonian, pick up much more words from spoken Serbo-Croatian than spoken Bulgarian. I think that this article is full of dubious numbers, but this is not necessarily the authors fault. A Serb gave me this information. Most pairs have no figure for written intelligibility. I have friends from Bulgaria and I can tell you that they have problems by understanding some things. Belarussian has 80% intelligibility of Ukrainian and 55% of Polish. Furthermore, not only does this app provide small lessons that can be expanded into full-on courses, but it also allows you to interact with native speakers of the target language. I got that figure from a Serb. On the one hand, Belarussian has some dialects that are intelligible with some dialects of both Russian and Ukrainian. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. Eastern Slovak has 82% intelligibility of Rusyn and 72% of Ukrainian. So you believe the 9/11 narrative? Even little kids who watch the show understand. 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. Eastern Slovak has ~80% intelligibility of Rusyn. 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. Like a shits to o. I can only speak from my personal experience (business trips to Czech Republic - Ostrava, Praha, Mlad Boleslav, Mikulov ). When I was first exposed to spoken BCS, the most significant issue was their prosody, because the vocabulary and the grammar presented very little difficulty for me as a Ukrainian/Russian bilingual. You cannot simply separate the articles from the words during a regular conversation. 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. 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. Finally, understanding mutual intelligibility gives you helpful insight into the history of a language. What percentage of Ukraine speaks Polish? When I visited Bulgaria I tried to communicate in Serbian language with the Bulgars. Russian. Mutual Intelligibility among the Slavic Languages by Robert Lindsay The mutual intelligibility (MI) of the languages of the Slavic family is an interesting topic because many are mutually intelligible to one degree or another. Czech completely and utterly incomprehensible. Im Czech . Czechs hardly ever study at Slovak universities. So give these mutually intelligible languages a second look. Much of the claimed intelligibility is simply bilingual learning. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9 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. Go back to your kennel. It is not a failure. 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). CZECH: Bulharsk jazyk je indoevropsk jazyk ze skupiny jihoslovanskch jazyk. 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. For instance, West Palesian is a transitional Belarussian dialect to Ukrainian. Answer (1 of 4): Yes. 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. Yet, it is closer to Russian that standard Ukrainian. For the south slavic speakers, it is a commonism, almost a joke, for a Serb and a Croat to argue---in a mutually intelligible language---that . It may have been split from Polish for up to 800 years, where it underwent heavy German influence. About Boyko/Hutsul dialects which according to you are more understandable to Russian person than Ukrainian language I will disagree with you. possession is indicated most frequently using dative pronouns, unlike Serbians tendency to use possessive pronouns in greater frequency Some comments on Ukrainian: Feb 22, 2020. 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. They are native Kajkavian speakers and this is another proof that Kajkavian is actually Slovenian. This debate occurred only in Croatian linguistic circles, and the public knows nothing about it (Jembrigh 2014). America paid us to hand over al-Qaeda suspects Im Slovenian, my mother tongue is Slovenian, however I have also learnt Serbo-Croatian from a very early age. The standard view among linguists seems to be that Lach is a part of Czech. Problem is the spoken form, as Bulgarians dont speak as it is written, which is the case with serbian or croatian. It is not intelligible with Shtokavian, although this is controversial. And Shtokavian is dialect of Serbian language. Robert does look at these stories. I can randomly pick up another paragraph from that Wikipedia page, and it would be harder: So you are a speaker of Southern Chakavian, right? Probably, ja u da radim for Bosnians and Croatians sounds very Serbian. In Ukrainian, one might say "I am waiting for you" ; however, there is no need for a conjunction in . Also, the question is: -did this Serb speak other Slavic languages? With Lonely Planet's Ukrainian Phrasebook, let no barriers . I use Wikipedia as a reference for new languages that Wikipedia misses, like the 4 Croatian languages. 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). Finally, I think the Ukrainians' mentality if more Polish, while the Russian mentality is more fourteenth century Mongol. About Slovak being two different unintelligible languages I highly doubt so.