I can only speak from my personal experience (business trips to Czech Republic - Ostrava, Praha, Mlad Boleslav, Mikulov ). 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. It seems polish and bulgarian are the easiest for me to understand (save for bosnian, serbian, and crnogorski). Czech has 94% intelligibility of Slovak, 12% of Polish, and 5% of Russian and Bulgarian. So I understood 100% But I admit that it was a relatively very easy text. can take anywhere. The truth is that a person can often understand other dialects, except his native one. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc, or its affiliates. The written languages differ much more than the spoken ones. Is Ukrainian mutually intelligible with Polish? Ikavian Chakavian has two branches Southwestern Istrian and Southern Chakavian. Many Ukrainian-speakers consider the language . All foreign movies in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia are translated into Czech, not Slovak. Slovenian speakers find it hard to understand most of the other Yugoslav lects except for Kajkavian Croatian. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in . In terms of pronunciation, Ukrainian or Southeastern Yiddish can be considered to occupy an intermediate position between Northeastern and Central Yiddish. I met Croats from Zagreb and they speak Slovenian perfectly. Ive not read em myself. 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. 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. There are some dialects around Buzet that seem to be the remains of old Kajkavian-Chakavian transitional dialects (Jembrigh 2014). Score: 4.1/5 (68 votes) . but they are often mutually intelligible. Chakavian and Kajkavian have high, but not full mutual intelligibility. A Serbian native speaker felt that the percentages for South Slavic seemed to be accurate. Russian is actually a little further, but most Belarusian speakers are bilingual (Bel-Rus) and most Ukrainian . Eastern Slovak has ~80% intelligibility of Rusyn. I thought this is Croatia! Much of my vocabulary simply isnt present in their lects, even when I try and align myself to speak more in line with the norm. These attacks killed over 200 people. 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). Classifications may also shift for reasons external to the languages themselves. In writing, German is also somewhat mutually intelligible with Dutch. Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages https://www.academia.edu/4080349/Mutual_Intelligibility_of_Languages_in_the_Slavic_Family I use Ethnologues list of languages and dialects, but extend it a bit. Even little kids who watch the show understand. 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. 60%? 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. Cieszyn Silesian speakers strongly reject the notion that they speak the same language as Upper Silesians. They sometimes say that youngsters do not but that is just a myth. Some Russians and Bulgarians say they understand almost nothing of the other language. When there, they have to pass a language test. Czechs see Slovaks as country bumpkins backwards and folksy but optimistic, outgoing and friendly. 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. Is there any way you could give me percentage figures for these observations of your wifes? Polish only a few words. A number of native speakers of various Slavic lects were interviewed about mutual intelligibility, language/dialect confusion, the state of their language, its history and so on. 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. I can give you an example of how I can read Bulgarian: As an example, in the case of a linear dialect continuum that shades gradually between varieties, where speakers near the center can understand the varieties at both ends with relative ease, but speakers at one end have difficulty understanding the speakers at the other end, the entire chain is often considered a single language. There is a big problem with this. They are essentially speaking the same language. Russian: 15% spoken, 25% written Then conversation is intelligible 100%. Score: 4.1/5 (74 votes) . The German influence is more prominent in the west; Polish influence is greater in the east. The Answer, and Examples for 8 World Languages. Slovak somewhat more than Polish, but still very little. Personally Im a Taoist in relation to 9/11, the middle way, you know? the copula is mostly the same (sm/si/e/smo/ste/su vs. sum/si/e/sme/ste/se) akavian differs from the other nearby Slavic lects spoken in the country due to the presence of many Italian words. Slovenians, Macedonians and Bulgars used to be one nation called Sklaveni and they were living in the south Hungary. Donations are the only thing that keep the site operating. From a grammatical and morphological perspective, Ukrainian is closer to Russian: they both have East Slavic roots. Polish is the most incomprehensible Slavic language for other Slavs, both spoken and written. 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. A more updated version of this paper with working hyperlinks can be found on Academia.edu here. I think Robert has done articles on 9/11 conspiracy theories and their level of crediblity, yeah. Masovian, which is spoken throughout the central and eastern regions of Poland. These recommendations are based on research into the mutual intelligibility of Germanic languages, conducted by Femke Swarte. It is also said that West Slovak (Bratislava) cannot understand East Slovak, so Slovak may actually two different languages, but this is controversial. Serbs did not have the same language contact with the Macedonian language as Macedonians with Serbocroatian did. 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). Slovenians have a very hard time understanding Poles and Czechs and vice versa. It all adds up, man. Here are three critical ways in which Bulgarian and Russian speakers differ. You really need to go look at the new version of the paper. Intelligibility problems are mostly on the Czech end because they dont bother to learn Slovak while many Slovaks learn Czech. Hello Mr Lindsay, Also sorry for my English. 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). OMG! 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. 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. The results show that in most cases, a division between West and South Slavic languages does exist and that West . All Rights Reserved. There is as much Czech literature and media as Slovak literature and media in Slovakia, and many Slovaks study at Czech universities. On the one hand, Belarussian has some dialects that are intelligible with some dialects of both Russian and Ukrainian. Postby voron 2018-01-26, 22:33. 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. Accent is on last or penultimate syllable. Mezentseva, Inna. Macedonian syntax and lexics are more similar to Serbian, even though structures of the language such as articles (no declensions) function as in Bulgarian. This is because colloquial Ukrainian is closer to the Ukrainian spoken in the Soviet era which had huge Russian influence. Sets of similar languages are the result of shared origin, so knowing a little more about mutual intelligibility can help you understand their origin. But reading a Bulgarian text is surprisingly easy, because the phonology and vocabulary are very similar. 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. Shtokavian is simply the same Serbo-Croatian language that is also spoken in Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia. Between some languages, there can also be imbalanced mutual intelligibility, known as asymmetric intelligibility. This occurs when speakers of one language can understand a related language to a greater degree than speakers of the related language can understand the other. Around 80% comprehension, it gets hard to talk about complex or technical things. do is the same verb (prim/pri/pri/primo/prite/pre vs. pravam/pravi/pravi/pravime/pravite/pravaat; as opposed to Serbian raditi) 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. Spanish has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with Galician, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Sardinian and French. I would be able to translate what he says! 1996 . Can a Russian speaker understand Polish? Czech-Polish is not at 12% anymore, a new study has found it is 32%. There are new scientific figures for Czech-Slovak, Czech-Serbo-Croatian and Czech-Bulgarian. 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. But even they will know the literary norm of their own language which will ease up the communication. 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). 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 can read and understand a lot of Bulgarian in written form, its basically old slavic , many such words are simply obsolete or archaic in modern serbian, but i do get the gist of any written article. 40% of Silesian vocabulary is different from Polish, mostly Germanisms. He alleges that Sheikh later double-crossed British intelligence. Pannonian Rusyn lacks full intelligibility of Rusyn proper. I once had a conversation with a young woman from the Czech Republic. She doesn't speak any Polish so it's going to be an interesting challenge. Your email address will not be published. Therefore . Borg, Albert J.; Azzopardi-Alexander, Marie (1997). 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. 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 ? Student Authored Website. How this is measured varies, but mutual intelligibility and vocabulary overlap, and often play a role in these calculations. That being said, the line between a language and a dialect is often blurred. I see your point, and I agree: there must be a difference in method when determining linguistic intelligibility based on different populations. Kids speak both languages, as well as English, fluently. How much of Ukrainian can these Russians in Canada understand? People from Lviv and larger cities and towns in western Ukraine have a slight clipped accent but they speak standard Ukrainian. Frequency of exposure is one of the main causes of this. Czech and Slovak are simply dialects of this one tongue. Polish ~ Kashubian . Are Slovenian and Croatian mutually intelligible? - 2023 LINGO | Gaston Dorren, language writer Id guess mutual intelligibility there is somewhere on the level of 75~80%, which is pretty pathetic. Chakavian has a low mutual intelligibility with either, in part due to its large number of loanwords from Venetian. So I asked my Russian wife to listen to some of them (mostly local news on Youtube). adrian. So, when you're learning the Polish alphabet, all you have to pay attention to are the special accents and the pronunciation. With this, off I go to sleep. The Polish alphabet includes certain additional letters formed using diacritics: the kreska in the letters , , , , and through the letter in ; the kropka in the letter , and the ogonek ("little . Answer (1 of 16): I'm neither Polish nor Ukrainian but I know Polish to a good level and basic Ukrainian; I can comment on the understandability of Ukrainian for Poles. There is just a little problem to understand east Slovaks for Czechs from naywhere. 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! Serbians and Bosnians not so such. Polish 5 % spoken, 20 % written ????? 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. It has a very high degree of mutual intelligibility with Galician (spoken in Northwestern Spain), which is a language thats sort of a cross between Portuguese and Spanish. 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. As a result, I, who spoke fluent Ukrainian when I moved from Ukraine 18 years ago, have problems following modern speech on TV. Linguistic distance is the name for the concept of calculating a measurement for how different languages are from one another. Bulharsk jazyk je plurocentrick jazyk m nkolik kninch norem. Mutual intelligibility also occurs in a wide variety of degrees, ranging from none, to partial, to full mutual intelligibility. Spanish is most mutually intelligible with Galician. WORD. Still others (for example, Voegelin and Voegelin 1977) recognize just two main dialect groups: Eastern and Western Ukrainian. Toj e oficialnijat ezik na Republika Balgarija i edin iz 23-te oficialni ezika na Evropejskija sajuz. It is not a failure. 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 shows that Macedonians indeed grew up to certain extent as bilingual Macedonian-Serbian. 99% of people in Ukraine are bilinguals who essentially speak and learn both Russian and Ukrainian from birth (although depending on the region, ones prevailence over the other varies). They have more in common than you might think! It has been massively updated with a lot of new research from controlled scientific intelligibility studies. I have no problems understanding the Torlakian dialect. How similar actually are Ukrainian and Polish? (Belarusian too) How to explain that? Good post, OP. When I visited Bulgaria I tried to communicate in Serbian language with the Bulgars. During the last 20 years, Ukraine has tried to make the language norm as far from Russian as possible for nationalistic reasons. Portuguese also has a high degree of mutual intelligibility with Spanish. but what if person is from island and speaks heavy akavian and tokavian speaker is real tokavian like from Slavonia (North Eastern Croatia). This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you Serbs until recently where still self titled Yugoslavs. 5. So you believe the 9/11 narrative? A different dialect is spoken in each town. 4.3. YIDDISH DIALECTS - JewishGen I would like to add an interesting fact Slovenian has very harsh dialects due to the historic separation of different regions. Can a Ukrainian understand Polish? (2023) - salnom.best Molise Croatian is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. Yet some say that the subtitles are simply put on as a political move due to Ukraines puristic language policy. If the Torlaks can understand those languages it is because they have been hearing them! Everything else we chalk up to bilingual learning as we call it and we do not think it is accurate. Most Croatian linguists recognized Kajkavian as a separate language. 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. If you speak Russian, it will be easier for you to understand other Slavic languages, which include Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene. Other factors that one has to keep in mind is recent (and not so recent, too) history and its linguistic implications on speakers for instance, Slovaks older that about 20 dont have much trouble understanding Czech because Czech was pretty intrusive if not dominant in official and intercommunal use in Czechoslovakia until its collapse. Thanks for the information about Eastern Slovak I will incorporate it. I can easily translate the first two sentences: Bulgarian is the oldest documented Slavic language. But they would learn it quickly if they cared. 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 . 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. Much of the claimed intelligibility between Czech and Slovak was simply bilingual learning. 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. Polish is not intelligible with Kashubian, a language related to Polish spoken in the north of Poland. People observing conversation between Cieszyn Silesian and Upper Silesian report that they have a hard time understanding each other. In the towns of Pirot and Vranje, it cannot be said that they speak Serbo-Croatian; instead they speak this Bulgarian-Serbo-Croatian mixed speech. But despite similarities in grammar and vocabulary and almost identical alphabets, they differ sharply in many ways and are not mutually intelligible. 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. I think it was mostly due to a learning few high frequency Polish words that are difficult for a Russian native speaker to understand. These are 33 brand new symbols that you'd have . I am really sorry, but if you are speaking about science, you cannot just say. Email me and give me your name please and I will use you in the paper. But still Slovene and Dalmatian akavian speaker can talk if they stick to old slavic part of their respective languages. Also akavian has some elements of its own. It is time to stop believing to the politically motivated propaganda about our languages and start telling the truth. Then she talks about the cards in the bags, I again understand everything, but at 0:47, another stream of unintelligible sounds is starting. I speak tokavski croatian (and can read and understand serbian (both cyrillic and latin) and can adapt my croatian to be more serbian grammatically and with vocabulary) and just recently I had a conversation where I spoke croatian and the other person spoke polish. Serbs can read both cyrillic and latin without any problem even if that two scripts are mixed in a word or sentence. London Times, 25 September 2006 Sledva da se otbelei, e tova delene e uslovno i imenata ne otrazjavat razlini ezici, a samo periodi v razvitieto na balgarskija ezik, za koito se otkrivat charakterni belezi. possession is indicated most frequently using dative pronouns, unlike Serbians tendency to use possessive pronouns in greater frequency The more the better. 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. Map; Russia's Periphery* Baltic States. Polish uses Latin letters, just like English. About Boyko/Hutsul dialects which according to you are more understandable to Russian person than Ukrainian language I will disagree with you. Many Poles insist that Silesian is a Polish dialect, but this is based more on politics than reality. Tradues em contexto de "mutuamente compreensvel" en portugus-ingls da Reverso Context : Os membros da equipa de verificao da Comisso podem comunicar com as autoridades e com o pessoal do operador da instalao numa lngua comum e mutuamente compreensvel. But the language isnt problem. I also conclude that in terms of straight linguistic science anyway, Czech and Slovak are simply one language called Czechoslovakian. - Wikipedia Lesser Polish, which can be heard in the south and southeast. I always aske her about whether she understands Bulgarian and Serbian and she claims Serbian is way closer to her language rather than Bulgarian. Interesting article but I think there are some minor and some major mistakes and misunderstandigs. If one takes the transitional dialects which make a triangle between Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, one can say that it is also one language. . I think that this article is full of dubious numbers, but this is not necessarily the authors fault. However, many groups of languages are partly mutually intelligible, i.e. a person with Virgin ears from any where in the Czech republic and west and central Slovakia will understand each other fairly well. Look at this Polish girl: 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. 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 . Northern Germanic languages spoken in Scandinavia form a dialect continuum where two furthermost dialects have almost no mutual intelligibility. If you take your 25 (supposedly from Novi Sad) and 90 from Nis, then we come to about 60 percent (from Serbian side). In Serbian word order is not that important like it is in English. http://www.network54.com/Forum/84302/thread/1289113786/last-1289113786/British+intelligence+links+to+African+Emabssy+bombings. Its spelling, however, is quite different from any of them.