It is true that Western Slovak dialects can understand Czech well, but Central Slovak, Eastern Slovak and Extraslovakian Slovak dialects cannot. During the last 20 years, Ukraine has tried to make the language norm as far from Russian as possible for nationalistic reasons. This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you You also have these words? Czech and Polish are incomprehensible to Serbo-Croatian speakers (Czech 10%, Polish 5%), but Serbo-Croatian has some limited comprehension of Slovak, on the order of 25%. I believe Polish 5 % spoken, 20 % written 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. Yet there is a dialect continuum between Slovenian and Kajkavian. Ukrainians can understand Russian much better than the other way around. It may have been split from Polish for up to 800 years, where it underwent heavy German influence. 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). Yet, it is closer to Russian that standard Ukrainian. I am born and raised in Western Ukraine in a Russophone family. In essence, such kinds of bilingualism also improve understanding of other, unrelated Slavic languages, since two Slavic languages fill in the comprehension gaps. A question: how is it decided that the cut-off between a language and dialect is 90% MI? 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. As an addendum, Id like to make it known that my own grandmother, who hails from a village some twenty kilometers southwest of Ni, got lost in Belgrade once but has no problem getting around Skopje. The answer is that Izetbegovi is speaking too fast, he is often basically mumbling, and due to the different stress, I cannot identify, where the words start and end. A more updated version of this paper with working hyperlinks can be found on Academia.edu here. In Serbian word order is not that important like it is in English. 5 (2): 135146. What Are Mutually Intelligible Languages? adrian. Croats say Macedonian is a complete mystery to them. Russian 20 % spoken, 30 % written Although most words are in fact different, they are largely similar, being cognates, which makes both languages mutually intelligible to a significant extent; . Older people who rembember federation understand everything. For majority of the Shtokavian speakers thats just another language: different grammar, vocabulary, pronunciations, even sounds (Kai has at least 9 vowels while Shto Croatian only 5 for example). For instance, Portuguese and Spanish have a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility, but theyre technically separate languages. So you believe the 9/11 narrative? Personally Im a Taoist in relation to 9/11, the middle way, you know? It depends which dialect. Now onto the discussion. but what if person is from island and speaks heavy akavian and tokavian speaker is real tokavian like from Slavonia (North Eastern Croatia). Czech and Slovak are more intelligible to me then Slovenian with Slovak more so then Czech. Im of the Yugoslav variety by rearing, and a Serb by select bits of culture, by most of my native language and by all of where my tax money goes. | Animals | Slavic Languages Comparison The Best Online German Learning Resources Ukrainian phrases Ukrainian Phrasebook And Dictionary Paperback Lonely Planet: The world's leading travel guide publisher. Robert does look at these stories. 2023 Enux Education Limited. Those 12% in Polish are very dubious as well. . akavski has considerably more italian influence, due to many of the people there speaking italian (vicinity to italy) and the presence of istriot language and the former presence of dalmatian language. It is estimated that there is 89% lexical similarity with French, 87% similarity with Catalan (spoken in Southern Spain), 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 78% with Ladin (spoken in Northern Italy) and 77% with Romanian. Polish is the most incomprehensible Slavic language for other Slavs, both spoken and written. 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. This is not necessarily correct in terms of vocabulary, but you will find a lot in common in the grammatical rules . Id guess mutual intelligibility there is somewhere on the level of 75~80%, which is pretty pathetic. Many Poles insist that Silesian is a Polish dialect, but this is based more on politics than reality. They understand almost nothing. People observing conversation between Cieszyn Silesian and Upper Silesian report that they have a hard time understanding each other. Their mutual intelligibility varies greatly, between the dialects themselves, with Shtokavian, and with other languages. . The claim for separate languages is based more on politics than on linguistic science. 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. While not usually considered mutually intelligible, theres also enough similarity between French and Italian that speakers of Portuguese may understand both of these languages. If one takes the transitional dialects which make a triangle between Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, one can say that it is also one language. Hello can I use your comments in a paper I am writing? Nevertheless, although intelligibility with Slovenian is high, Kajkavian lacks full intelligibility with Slovenian. This has, however, more to do with the new Ukrainian norm. Slovenian: 20% IOW, I think there are two languages Czech and Slovak and I do not agree that they are the same language with two dialects. Rusyn ~ Ukrainian . Bolgarian 30 % spoken, 50 % written Thank you. Thanks so much for this post. I also understand more of other Slavic languages then neotokavian speakers do. [2], Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible,[3] although there are also similarities among different sign languages. Polish and Ukrainian have higher lexical similarity at 72%, and Ukrainian intelligibility of Polish is ~50%+. Since then, Slovak has been disappearing from the Czech Republic, so the younger people dont understand Slovak so well. 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. Slovenian speakers find it hard to understand most of the other Yugoslav lects except for Kajkavian Croatian. Hence, many religious books were imported from Russia, and these books influenced Bulgarian. For example, all Russian shows get subtitles on Ukrainian TV. You can pick out the common words like Voda (water), Hleb (bread), zima (cold) and so forth but it is tough to get the jist of what they are saying with out more immersion. That is a particularly ugly version of nationalism brewing in your vicinity. This is simply not the case. 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 . She doesn't speak any Polish so it's going to be an interesting challenge. Intelligibility in the Slavic languages of the Balkans is much exaggerated. The standard view among linguists seems to be that Lach is a part of Czech. This implies that some of the high intelligibility between Slovak and Polish may be due to bilingual learning on the part of Slovaks. Map; Russia's Periphery* Baltic States. Serbo-Croatian and Russian have 10-15% intelligibility, if that, yet written intelligibility is higher at 25%. 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. Ukrainian pronounces the "o" as "o" whereas Russians pronounce it typically as an "a." The Ukrainian "" and "" have different pronunciations compared to their Russian equivalents, "" and "". Postby voron 2018-01-26, 22:33. Hutsul, Lemko, Boiko speech (small Ukrainian/Rusyn dialects) stangely enough, more comprehensible than standard Ukrainian. If you're russian you understand the meaning of what other is saying to a degree of around 80%. He gave me the 25% figure. Rural variations are usually less mutually intelligible. Macedonian: 50-60 % Its mainly in the weird Bulgarian grammar! I also run a YouTube channel where I try to put the differences within the Croatias borders online since many whove seen them were surprised (or shocked). Due to no prior exposure to Russian, I could not understand that language, other than a few words and expressions here and there. Congratulations on a brilliant article! I put it to Google translator and I got this: Bulgarian has 80% intelligibility of Macedonian, 41% of Russian, and 5% of Polish and Czech. Can you give me a figure for how much of a Bulgarian text you can understand? Yes you can. If you can speak Russian fluently, you will be able to understand 77% of Polish words, while Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, and . However Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are not like Czech and Slovak. Czech 20 % spoken, 40 % written In the 1500s, Kajkavian began to be developed in a standard literary form. Macedonian side, the situation is more complicated (i will explain later). Czechs are more urbane. slavic mutual newspaper [4], Some linguists use mutual intelligibility as a primary criterion for determining whether two speech varieties represent the same or different languages. I am a native Spanish speaker but my girlfriend is Macedonian. Nevertheless, writing continues in various Kajkavian dialects which still retain some connection to the old literary language, although some of the lexicon and grammar are going out (Jembrigh 2014). Can a Russian speaker understand Polish? How to explain that? But the language isnt problem. It shows that Macedonians indeed grew up to certain extent as bilingual Macedonian-Serbian. Is there an agreed-upon standard? The historical development is characterized by four main periods. Part of the problem between Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian is that so many of the basic words be, do, this, that, where are different, however, much of the rest of the vocabulary is the same. To deal with the conflict in cases such as Arabic, Chinese and German, the term Dachsprache (a sociolinguistic "umbrella language") is sometimes seen: Chinese and German are languages in the sociolinguistic sense even though speakers of some varieties cannot understand each other without recourse to a standard or prestige form. At some point he probably became a rogue or double agent, General Musharraf says. Spoken Slovenian is a surprise too its phonology has a significant German influence. 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. I speak both Southern akavian and neotokavian. Understanding the connection between mutually intelligible languages, can make it easier to learn an additional language. Other then that difference is in grammar and accent. & relat.)) 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). 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. If I had to name a Slavic language worst for intelligibility, it would absolutely and positively have to be Bulgarian its phonetics are completely foreign (to the extent that sometimes in the back of my mind I think that it sounds barbarian and Turkish), as is its grammar (the vocabulary, however, is not, being probably 90% similar to Russian, making written Bulgarian pretty easy). Only nationalists and fanatics disagree. Personal communication. Slovenians have a very hard time understanding Poles and Czechs and vice versa. 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 . There is one factor they dont know about the internet. This is a great boon to travelers and language learners. Ukrainian much less comprehensible. Download: However, any suggestions that Kajkavian is a separate language are censored on Croatian TV (Jembrigh 2014). However, she is from Skopje, close to the Serbian border and which have had much more influence from Serbian. When we do intelligiblity studies, we look for virgin ears or people who have not heard the other language much or at all. Slovenian language might be closer to the Macedonian/Bulgarian than to the Serbian language. > Much of the claimed intelligibility was simply bilingual learning. 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. My family comes from Kaikavian (50%), Chakavian (25%) and Shtokavian (25%) areas, but at home, especially last years, we prefer to use only Kaikavian-Chakavian. But akavian being archaic it has old slavic package. Spanish and Catalan have a lexical similarity of 85%. Also how much of Rusyn do Russians understand on a % basis? Many Ukrainian-speakers consider the language . She introduces her and her two friends from the Czech republic and Spain, Because she speaks very clearly and slowly, I understand everything between 0:25-0:32, but then she starts a fast flood of words and between 0:32-0:36 I basically hear only s. For instance, akavian Croatian is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. Was he educated? The idea is that the Kajkavian and Chakavian languages simply do not exist, though obviously they are both separate languages. People from Lviv and larger cities and towns in western Ukraine have a slight clipped accent but they speak standard Ukrainian. The old Dniestrian/Galician speech is largely confined to rural areas. 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. Ja u da radim is a form more related to Macedonian and south eastern dialects of Serbo-Croatian. Albeit, Scots dialect is far more pronounced than English, and at times, can be unintelligible. 4. In addition, the two groups have different cultural norms and values. I have the hardest time to understand anything of Bulgarian, it sounds really fast and choppy but similar to Russian sometimes. He was a member of a group of linguists who met periodically to discuss the field. Polish is not intelligible with Kashubian, a language related to Polish spoken in the north of Poland. 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? Slovak-Czech MI tests out at 82% in studies, which seems about right. Some islanders go even further than that and don`t consider themselves ethnic Croats. It is more like the other slavic languages (v instead of u, z instead of s, itd, less vowels, and no distinction between and ). http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9 And when islanders respond back in akavian they are puzzled: What? I can understand quite a bit of basic polish when it is spoken on the street, but their pronunciation is so weird its hard to notice sometimes. Maybe it is true for two persons from the opposite end of the dialect continium (Hrvatsko Zagorje and Strumica), that have never been out of their villages and try to communicate on their respective native dialects. Ive done tests with my friends shtokavians-only (or monolingual Croats regarding the situation here) and it was very interesting. 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. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in . When there, they have to pass a language test. Do Ukrainians and Polish like each other? Slovak students do not have to pass a language test at Czech universities. December 2014. Masovian, which is spoken throughout the central and eastern regions of Poland. On the other hand, it can be difficult for Russians to understand Ukrainian (though it is easy for them to learn it). Despite a lot of commonality between the dialects, the differences between them are significant. A primary challenge to these positions is that speakers of closely related languages can often communicate with each other effectively if they choose to do so. It uses shtokavian dialect but simultaniously italianized vocabulary,and it is very hard to be understood while speaking to a common Croatian speaker.Would that also be considered a separate language? However, another view is that Lach is indeed Lechitic, albeit with strong Czech influence. http://www.network54.com/Forum/84302/thread/1284248981/last-1288620675/The+real+9-11+cover+up-+Political+hijacking++was+originally+aimed+at+Russia. 5. Czech has 82% intelligibility of Slovak (varies from 70-95%), 12% of Polish and 5% of Russian and Bulgarian. Communication about such things is significantly impaired at this level. Eastern Slovak has 82% intelligibility of Rusyn and 72% of Ukrainian. A professor of Slavic Linguistics at a university in Bulgaria reviewed the paper and felt that the percentages were accurate. Robert Lindsay. I dont know about Macedonian (havent ever heard or read it) but it seems to be like in the middle between Serbian and Bulgarian (just like frisian is in the middle of dutch and english). Polish lacks full intelligibility of Silesian, although this is controversial (see below). The problem is that most linguists are not interested in scientific intelligibility testing of language pairs. It is also said that West Slovak (Bratislava) cannot understand East Slovak, so Slovak may actually two different languages, but this is controversial. Complicating the picture is the fact that many Ukrainians are bilingual and speak Russian also. Check out his page on the FBI 10 most wanted website. 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. All Rights Reserved. Ponaszymu also has many Germanisms which have been falling out of use lately, replaced by their Czech equivalents. It was for me a bit strange, because Bulgarian science still supports the thesis that Macedonian is Bulgarian. Re: Rus/Ukr Belarussian has 80% intelligibility of Ukrainian and 55% of Polish. Ukrainian has 62% lexical similarity with Russian but 70% with Polish, which isn't high enough for mutual intelligibility with both Russian and Polish, but Poles can certainly understand Ukrainian much better than Russian, and Russians can understand Ukrainian much better than Poles. There are some words that we don't understand, but in general, these languages are much closer to each other than the pairs Russian-Ukrainian and Russian-Belarusian. For instance, West Palesian is a transitional Belarussian dialect to Ukrainian. In the case of transparently cognate languages officially recognized as distinct such as Spanish and Italian, mutual intelligibility is in principle and in practice not binary (simply yes or no), but occurs in varying degrees, subject to numerous variables specific to individual speakers in the context of the communication. Foreign languages arent always as foreign as youd expect. Three different methods were used: a word translation task, a cloze test and a picture task. Reading a Bulgarian text is not like reading an ordinary book in Czech, it would cost my brain much more kilojoules (but maybe mainly due to the monotonous Cyrilic script), but it is possible. Written intelligibility is higher at 25%. At least not in general if so, it might depend on the school. Russian has low intelligibility with Czech and Slovak, maybe 30%. Russian has a decent intelligibility with Bulgarian, possibly on the order of 50%, but Bulgarian intelligibility of Russian seems lower. From his own words it is possible to conclude that mutual inteligibility between czech and slovak is very high, and Ive heard from young czechs that they still can understand slovak with no effort. While discussing mutual intelligibility, the author often calls upon bilingual learning; for example, Czech and Slovak are considered highly intelligible because of the strong cross-cultural overlap. I work with Russians (dro. Then tokavian person reaction would be: What? Linguistic distance is the name for the concept of calculating a measurement for how different languages are from one another. Its also highly intelligible with Portuguese in writing, though less so when spoken. 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. ", "English in Scotland a phonological approach", "Mutual Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages within the Romance language family", "How Konkani Won the Battle for 'Languagehood', "Algumas observaes sobre a noo de lngua portuguesa", Romanian language Britannica Online Encyclopedia, "UCLA Language Materials Project: Language Profile", "Uzbek | the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies", "Soviet Dungan nationalism: a few comments on their origin and language", "The Linguistic Characteristic Of Esan Language: Towards Its Empowerment and Development", "Mutual intelligibility of spoken Maltese, Libyan Arabic, and Tunisian Arabic functionally tested: A pilot study", "Gdzie "sicz", a gdzie "porohy"?! This is the first time that this has been done using just . 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). But, as the goal of the OP was to debunk the myth that says every slavic speaker can understand each other, he is quite right on that. When it is relatively symmetric, it is characterized as "mutual". From the 1500s to 1900, a large corpus of Kajkavian literature was written. Cieszyn Silesian or Ponaszymu is a language closely related to Silesian spoken in Czechoslovakia in the far northeast of the country near the Polish and Slovak borders. You are a smart guy. How many English speakers know Serbo-Croatian? This is also true of vocabulary and other aspects. Cieszyn Silesian speakers strongly reject the notion that they speak the same language as Upper Silesians. It's also highly intelligible with Portuguese in writing, though less so when spoken. 10%? I think the OP exagerated a bit. Not only that, but it is not even fully intelligible with the Eastern Slovak that it resembles most. Bulgarian more comprehensible than standard Ukrainian. Some say that West Palesian is actually a separate language, but the majority of Belarussian linguists say it is a dialect of Belarussian (Mezentseva 2014). He said if he was there for about a week he could understand probably everything. It consists of at least four major dialects, Ekavian Chakavian, spoken on the Istrian Peninsula, Ikavian Chakavian, spoken in southwestern Istria, the islands of Bra, Hvar, Vis, Korula, and olta, the Peljeac Peninsula, the Dalmatian coast at Zadar, the outskirts of Split and inland at Gacka, Middle Chakavian, which is Ikavian-Ekavian transitional, and Ijekavian Chakavian, spoken at the far southern end of the Chakavian language area on Lastovo Island, Janjina on the Peljeac Peninsula, and Bigova in the far south near the border with Montenegro. Together with the basic norm used in Bulgaria, there also exists a Macedonian norm, which (sao=also?) Russia) in Canada, and they barely can understand standard Ukrainian. She stated that Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible and that the main differences between the two languages is that Slovak has somewhat of a Hungarian inflluence, and Czech has more of a German and Latin component. [5][6] In a similar vein, some claim that mutual intelligibility is, ideally at least, the primary criterion separating languages from dialects.[7]. The Polish langauge uses the Latin script, while the Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic. Greg, Kaikavian is dialect of Slovenian language. However, the Croatian macrolanguage has strange lects that Standard Croatian (tokavian) cannot understand. For example, Dutch speakers tend to find it easier to understand Afrikaans than vice versa as a result of Afrikaans' simplified grammar. Bulgarian is a pluricentric language it has several literary norms. In this week's Slavic languages comparison we talk about animals in Polish and Ukrainian. Yes of course. However, you do say later in the text that I can barely understand czech (slovak I havent tried) and, as similar as it is to croatian, I can only understand a little slovenian. Grammar is almost identical. It is no surprise that Ukrainian (and to a smaller extent) Belarusian have tons of Polish words, and are therefore more lexically similar to Polish than to Russian.
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are polish and ukrainian mutually intelligible