Less than 90% mutual intelligibility = separate languages. 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 phenomenon is called asymmetrical mutual intelligibility. This difference is because Bulgarian is not spoken the same way it is written like Serbo-Croatian is. Its also highly intelligible with Portuguese in writing, though less so when spoken. What I took as Czech speaking Czech language, which I perfectly understand, was actually Czech who tries to speaks Polish. Slovene has some commonalities with the West Slavic languages. Hence, Russians understand the colloquial Ukrainian spoken in the countryside pretty well, but they understand the modern standard heard on TV much less. Heres his interview with Bosnian figures, and Bosnian is part of B/H/S landscape Russian has a decent intelligibility with Bulgarian, possibly on the order of 50%, but Bulgarian intelligibility of Russian seems lower. There is one factor they dont know about the internet. I am a native Macedonian and I totally dont agree with you. Here are three critical ways in which Bulgarian and Russian speakers differ. Nevertheless, Bulgarian-Russian intelligibility seems much exaggerated. 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). For instance, he and she in Standard Macedonia is toj and taa respectively, very close to Bulgarian toy and tya. Western Ukraine, at least urban Western Ukraine, no longer speaks the Galician dialect but rather standard Ukrainian. Because they use different alphabets, German and Yiddish are only mutually intelligible when spoken. The person did not understand everything what I wrote. His wife had never been to Poland and her language was completely foreign to me. This debate occurred only in Croatian linguistic circles, and the public knows nothing about it (Jembrigh 2014). 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 ? 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. Russian influence only ended in 1878. I speak both Southern akavian and neotokavian. My gues. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? do is the same verb (prim/pri/pri/primo/prite/pre vs. pravam/pravi/pravi/pravime/pravite/pravaat; as opposed to Serbian raditi) 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. In the case of Croatian and Slovene, the intelligibility is asymmetric, since Slovene participants could understand Croatian better than vice versa. There are also some TV shows that show Czech and Slovak contestants untranslated (like in Sweden where Norwegian comics perform untranslated), and most people seem to understand these shows. Slovak students do not have to pass a language test at Czech universities. Map; Russia's Periphery* Baltic States. Id guess mutual intelligibility there is somewhere on the level of 75~80%, which is pretty pathetic. I have had people give me personal estimates like 40%, 85%, 60-65%, 70%,10-15%, less than 1%, etc. I speak Slovenian and Croats think that I can speak Kaikavian. Polish uses Latin letters, just like English. Russian 20 % spoken, 30 % 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. Czechs see Slovaks as country bumpkins backwards and folksy but optimistic, outgoing and friendly. demonstratives (tk~ovd vs. tuka~ovde, tamo vs. tamu) and some elementary adverbs (sg vs. sega now; jutre vs. utre tomorrow; dns(ke) ~ deneska today, fera vs. vera yesterday) are fairly similar; Ni Torlak uses multiple sets of demonstratives as its 3rd person pronouns (toj/ta/to/ti/te/ta, onj/on/on/on/on/on, ovj/ov/ov/ov/ov/ov, in descending order of frequency) as opposed to Serbians almost exclusive use of on/ona/ono/oni/one/ona and standard Macedonians use of toj/taa/toa/tie WORD. The truth is that a person can often understand other dialects, except his native one. . Nice to meet you, Robert; Ill make sure to read more of your articles now! I have also friends from Central Macedonia (Prilep, Bitola) and I can tell how different they speak from the Skopjian dialect. Slovenian: 20% 25/01/23 | StarsInsider. The biggest Slavic language by far is Russian, which has 154 million native speakers and over 258 million speakers in total. However Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are not like Czech and Slovak. Ive been following this page and kept coming to it for the past months, actually more than a year (and have noticed some updates). Young czechs and slovaks communicate on internet on daily basis and they understand each other just perfectly. 2023 Enux Education Limited. A western Slovak can even understand most of Ruthenians hen they are speaking. Italian is partially mutually intelligible with French, Catalan, Sardinian, Spanish, Ladin and Romanian. Polish: Ukrainian and Belarusian (both partially; moreover, . Polish and Ukrainian have higher lexical similarity at 72%, and Ukrainian intelligibility of Polish is ~50%+. Chakavian and Kajkavian have high, but not full mutual intelligibility. Russian is partially mutually intelligible with Ukrainian, Rusyn and Belarusian. Can you give me your name here or can you email me with your name, unless that is you in your email address there. It has also been described as a transitional dialect between Polish and Slovak. In fact, people in the north of Poland regard Silesian as incomprehensible. Also how much of Rusyn do Russians understand on a % basis? Give me a figure in % for the Rusyn if you would. 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. Many of our word roots are the same. Not sure where did you get more similarity between Boyko dialects and Russian language? Funny thing when Slovene tourists come to Dalmatian islands they start to speak awkward Serbo Croatian they learned long ago in yugo schools because they fear of not being understood. 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. Ukrainians can understand Russian much better than the other way around. Pronunciation is quite different, but all patterns are easy to catch. Also I have a long article coming up as a chapter in a peer reviewed book being published out of Turkey. The thesis that Bulgarian and Macedonian are the same language is not real in the practice. For example, those who learn Ukrainian will eventually know 70% of Polish lexicon and a . The reason there are subtitles on Russian-language shows in Ukraine is because of Ukraines puristic state language policies. There is just a little problem to understand east Slovaks for Czechs from naywhere. The Aegean Macedonian dialects mostly spoken in Greece, such as the Lerinsko-Kostursko and Solunsko-Vodenskadialects, sound more Bulgarian than Macedonian. 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 . If you're russian you understand the meaning of what other is saying to a degree of around 80%. Kajkavian differs from the other Slavic lects spoken in Croatia in that is has many Hungarian and German loans (Jembrigh 2014). 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). I think that this article is full of dubious numbers, but this is not necessarily the authors fault. Is the virgin Intelligibility important? Intelligibility testing between East and West Slovak would seem to be in order. The higher the linguistic distance, the lower the mutual intelligibility. Macedonian: 50-60 % Yet its totally foreign to many in Croatia. Czech completely and utterly incomprehensible. Or as an English speaker, you might catch the gist of some Scots. Kids speak both languages, as well as English, fluently. Czech 20 % spoken, 40 % written Ukrainian and Belarusian are the closest languages, as together with Russian they form the East Slavic group of languages. I was surprised that they never live in Slovenia and they never learn Slovenian. http://ifaq.wap.org/society/voweldeployment.html. My father once read an article in polish and he said he understood almost everything, but when its spoken he said about 60%. My parents (and naturally me when I was child) make a lot of mistakes in the word cases and it means that they are (for the speakers from more west Serbian and also Croatian region) the lower social group, that they are not educated enough or that they are unread, and why dont Macedonians in their native language too, especially in ex Yugoslavia. Yet we speak of Kai/Cha as of Serbo-Croatian dialects, while Slovenian is totally foreign. 0%. 3. Salute from Czech republic. Lach is a Czech-Polish transitional lect with a close relationship with Cieszyn Silesian. December 2014. I have to really focus and try hard to understand them but with patience I can get buy. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? And o shifts to u. French has 89% lexical similarity with Italian, 80% similarity with Sardinian (spoken on the Italian island of Sardinia), 78% similarity with Romansh (spoken in parts of Switzerland) and 75% similarity with Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. "The Linguistic Innovation Emerging From Rohingya Refugees." BULGARIAN (transferred to the Latin script): algarskijat ezik e indoevropejski ezik ot grupata na junoslavjanskite ezici. Mr.Lindsay, My gues. Im The Lizard King, I Can Do Anything! Just one example: the letter g was eliminated in order to make the Ukrainian h correspond exactly with Russian g. Sorry for my English, Im still learning itespecially right word order. I can easily translate the first two sentences: Bulgarian is the oldest documented Slavic language. ????? Mutual intelligibility is highly subjective. 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. The Mutually Intelligible Languages of 8 Popular World Languages 1. Another similar example would be varieties of Arabic, which additionally share a single prestige variety in Modern Standard Arabic. KajkavianCroatian, spoken in northwest Croatia and similar to Slovenian, is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. Interesting article but I think there are some minor and some major mistakes and misunderstandigs. Czechs are more urbane. 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. I think that Russian has at least 89% with Belorussian, because I understand all speech in Belorusian. 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%. Kajkavian is probably closer to Slovenian than it is to Chakavian. FluentU brings a language to life with real-world videos. Speakers of the Torlak dialect (any Torlak dialect) understand Serbo-Croation, Macedonian and Bulgarian with no problem, and can comprehand Slovenian as much as 80-90% within a few weeks of exposure. I always aske her about whether she understands Bulgarian and Serbian and she claims Serbian is way closer to her language rather than Bulgarian. 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. The main difference is in the ortography. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-YqET96OO0&fs=1&hl=en_GB]. [2], Because of the difficulty of imposing boundaries on a continuum, various counts of the Romance languages are given; in The Linguasphere register of the worlds languages and speech communities David Dalby lists 23 based on mutual intelligibility:[13]. Far Northeastern Slovak (Saris Slovak) near the Polish border is close to Polish and Ukrainian. but they are often mutually intelligible. IOW, I think there are two languages Czech and Slovak and I do not agree that they are the same language with two dialects. For me having learnt some Slavic languages and watching Bulgarian TV was not very difficult. Polish has 22% intelligibility of Silesian, 12% of Czech, 6% of Russian, and 5% of Bulgarian. Learning a language becomes fun and easy when you learn with movie trailers, music videos, news and inspiring talks. It differs from the rest of Silesian in that it has undergone heavy Czech influence. 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). 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. Serbo-Croatian has only 20% intelligibility of Ukrainian. Very interesting. They give you strict % figures, and it is pretty amazing. | 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. 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). How much Slovene can your average Chakavian speaker understand? Thread starter Bamaro; Start date Feb 15, 2023 . In recent years, many of the German words are falling out of use and being replaced by Polish words, especially by young people. 60%? I kind of like it though . Most pairs have no figure for written intelligibility. I am a native Spanish speaker but my girlfriend is Macedonian. Some islanders go even further than that and don`t consider themselves ethnic Croats. That is a particularly ugly version of nationalism brewing in your vicinity. How many English speakers know Serbo-Croatian? So they speak Macedonian to me and I speak Serbian to them, and we understand each other perfectly. Also akavian has some elements of its own. The translation is not very problematic. I am afraid you are not right because if you take Serbian dialects till Nis, then they are very mutually intelligible with Macedonian! He estimated that Belarusian and Ukrainian were at least 80% mutually intelligible, accents and dialect aside, and that Russian was far . 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. How can you mesure intelligibility by using one single person. uses the Cyrlic script, and a Banat norm, which uses the Latin script. 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. However, Balachka is dying out and is now spoken only by a few old people. Good post, OP. Just search for alternative Croatian or kaikavian lessons and you will find me, along witht he contact information. In Linguistics, this MI stuff is noncontroversial. This list focuses on common languages widely thought to be at least partially and mutually intelligible. I tested this on my wife by showing her news clips on Youtube. I met Croats from Zagreb and they speak Slovenian perfectly. Its mainly in the weird Bulgarian grammar! 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. 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! In the 1500s, Kajkavian began to be developed in a standard literary form. Kashubian itself is a macrolanguage made up of two different languages, South Kashubian and North Kashubian, as the two have difficult intelligibility. For instance, akavian Croatian is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. What about USAs dialects. 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? 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). So here you have a case, when I could not understand everything, but I could grasp the meaning (at least). More properly, their speech is best seen as closer to Macedonian than to Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian. However, it appears to be a separate language, as Lach is not even intelligible within itself. Czech-Polish is not at 12% anymore, a new study has found it is 32%. I guess this would not have worked for Macedonian and Slovene in the Yugoslav army. . Buzet is actually transitional between Slovenian and Kajkavian. A professor of Slavic Linguistics at a university in Bulgaria reviewed the paper and felt that the percentages were accurate. 4. I also recognize a Macedonian who speaks Serbian by the vowel e, and their sound of () is much softer than Serbian one, something between Serbian and or even as same as . I think this is very difficult for Macedonians to distinguish this two consonants and pronounce them correctly. Most Croatian linguists recognized Kajkavian as a separate language. [2], Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible,[3] although there are also similarities among different sign languages. Contents1 Can Slovenians understand Croatian?2 What languages are mutually intelligible with Croatian?3 What is the closest language to Slovenian?4 Which two . Russian has high intelligibility of Belarussian, on the order of 75%. I put it to Google translator and I got this: 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. Its also said that Serbo-Croatian can understand Bulgarian and Macedonian, but this is not true. In addition, a Net search was done of forums where speakers of Slavic languages were discussing how much of other Slavic languages they understand. Some comments on Ukrainian: Linguistic distance is the name for the concept of calculating a measurement for how different languages are from one another. In other cases, I had to rely on the context. People who live in border regions have an advantage of speaking two languages and can easily comprehand other ones as well. It is often said that Ukrainian and Russian are intelligible with each other or even that they are the same language (a view perpetuated by Russian nationalists). Lesser Polish, which can be heard in the south and southeast. Every major language has some dialects Also both sides are able to use standard Slovak. And the 25% is very low. @jacobbauthumley Some people in Croatia asked me if I speak Kajkavian when I spoke Slovenian with my friends. 10%? Croatian-Shtokavian is only a dialect of Serbian language. My take on it is right here. However, my girlfriend never ever says these words and rather uses on and ona just like in Serbian. Torlakian (considered a subdialect of Serbian Old Shtokavian by some) has significant mutual intelligibility with Macedonian and Bulgarian. 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. According to Ethnologue, there are more than 7,000 languages in the world, with some being more difficult to learn than others. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? If one takes the transitional dialects which make a triangle between Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, one can say that it is also one language. I also conclude that in terms of straight linguistic science anyway, Czech and Slovak are simply one language called Czechoslovakian. That is ~90% our language. My email is on the Contact page. Here are the estimates about inteligebility with other Slavic languages from a person thats fluent in Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian: 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. 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. Standard Czech and standard Slovak is almost totally intelligible (I would say about 90%) only very few words are of different origin. The historical development is characterized by four main periods. It is not that hard. But they are unaware of the fact that islander have a lot of latin but also old Croatian (Slavic) words instead of Turkish which are used by supossedly more Croatian tokavian speaker. Nevertheless, although intelligibility with Slovenian is high, Kajkavian lacks full intelligibility with Slovenian. Perhaps you would care to explain why the FBI has NOT charged Osama Bin Ladin with 9/11 but with the African Embassy bombings. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9 Serbs did not have the same language contact with the Macedonian language as Macedonians with Serbocroatian did. London Times, 25 September 2006 Having lived in Moscow and being married to a Russian, I now speak Russian well enough to be mistaken for a Russian-speaking tourist from Poland or Lithuania when in Moscow. I think the OP exagerated a bit. Click here to get a copy. Most native speakers agree on MI. Shtokavian is simply the same Serbo-Croatian language that is also spoken in Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia. The results: In the former Czechoslovakia, everything was 50-50 bilingual media, literature, etc. Serbo-Croatian intelligibility of Slovenian is 25-30%. The intelligibility of Czech and Slovak is much exaggerated. Ukrainians and Belarusians understand each other's languages with no problem. Also what is a dialect and what is a language? becomes confusing for me since I can say a sentence in Kai/Cha thats almost the same in Slovene but different in BSCM standards. No there is not. While common speech from urban areas arent always mutually intelligible across regions, speakers from these regions can often use a more formal form of Arabic to speak with each other. Personally Im a Taoist in relation to 9/11, the middle way, you know? Polish and Ukrainian have higher lexical similarity at 72%, and Ukrainian intelligibility of Polish is ~50%+. Classifications may also shift for reasons external to the languages themselves. Maybe its a lack of vocabulary, but I havent heard that word from someone personally yet. Czechs claim only 10-15% intelligibility of Polish. I will also send you a copy so you can look over the Serbo-Croatian part and tell me if there are any errors. Pei Mario (1949). However, many groups of languages are partly mutually intelligible, i.e. 6. 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?