are polish and ukrainian mutually intelligible

Also, I can only understand a small bit of Russian, and Ukrainian is even more far off for me(the pronunciation is easier but understanding is harder) and I can understand quite a bit of bulgarian(especially when written). 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. Re: Cz/Slo 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. In other words, Ukrainian speakers can often understand Russian, while Russian speaker doesn't understand Ukrainian, especially Russian speakers from outside Ukraine. Polish is not intelligible with Kashubian, a language related to Polish spoken in the north of Poland. The Lemko dialect of Rusyn has only marginal intelligibility with Ukrainian. Ability of speakers of two language varieties to understand the other, As a criterion for identifying separate languages, List of languages sometimes considered varieties, List of dialects or varieties sometimes considered separate languages, Alexander M. Schenker. IOW, I think there are two languages Czech and Slovak and I do not agree that they are the same language with two dialects. Instead Eastern Lach and Western Lach have difficult intelligibility and are separate languages, so Lach itself is a macrolanguage. The truth is that a person can often understand other dialects, except his native one. I have the hardest time to understand anything of Bulgarian, it sounds really fast and choppy but similar to Russian sometimes. The results: Later I found out that Slovenian and Bulgarian/Macedonian are all south Slavic languages while Serbian language is actually a western Slavic language like Slovak/Czech/Polish. 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. 6. Czech 20 % spoken, 40 % written The Polish and Ukrainian languages come from the same Slavic roots, but are not so close that they are mutually intelligible. For example, the spirantisation of Slavic /g/ to /h/ is an areal feature shared by the Czech-Slovak group with both Ukrainian and Sorbian (but not with Polish). A lect called iarija Slovenian is spoken on the Istrian Peninsula in Slovenia just north of Croatia. I kind of like it though . This comment is fantastic! Eastern Slovak may have 72% intelligibility of Ukrainian. Because of all of this, tokavian speaker has a hard time understanding fast talking akavian speakers. In fact, some say the intelligibility between the two is near zero. The Russian language in the Ukraine has been declining recently mostly because since independence, the authorities have striven to make the new Ukrainian as far away from Russian as possible by adopting the Kharkiv Standard adopted in 1927 and jettisoning the 1932 Standard which brought Ukrainian more in line with Russian. Not sure where did you get more similarity between Boyko dialects and Russian language? Pannonian Rusyn lacks full intelligibility of Rusyn proper. Croats say Macedonian is a complete mystery to them. Basically, when you are listening to Bulgarians, you only hear an incomprehensible row of ta-jat-to-ta-jat-ta-to-ta. If the Torlaks can understand those languages it is because they have been hearing them! Western Ukraine, at least urban Western Ukraine, no longer speaks the Galician dialect but rather standard Ukrainian. Lach is a Czech-Polish transitional lect with a close relationship with Cieszyn Silesian. the copula is mostly the same (sm/si/e/smo/ste/su vs. sum/si/e/sme/ste/se) I will tell you also this: However, any suggestions that Kajkavian is a separate language are censored on Croatian TV (Jembrigh 2014). 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 biggest Slavic language by far is Russian, which has 154 million native speakers and over 258 million speakers in total. I am a native Macedonian and I totally dont agree with you. Russian. Due to no prior exposure to Russian, I could not understand that language, other than a few words and expressions here and there. 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. Understanding the connection between mutually intelligible languages, can make it easier to learn an additional language. However, many groups of languages are partly mutually intelligible, i.e. Only Croatians try so hard to press differences. 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. Czech and Slovak are simply dialects of this one tongue. Russian is followed by Polish with over 40 million speakers, Ukrainian with 33 million and Czech with 13 million. Some do in fact argue that Ukrainian shouldn't be considered as an East-Slavic language at all, being that it has more in common with West-Slavic languages such as Polish, Czech and Slovak than it . Ukrainians and Belarusians understand each other's languages with no problem. Nice to meet you, Robert; Ill make sure to read more of your articles now! Contents1 Can Slovenians understand Croatian?2 What languages are mutually intelligible with Croatian?3 What is the closest language to Slovenian?4 Which two . Hutch Mon May 14, 2007 12:25 am GMT. Jembrigh, Mario. Both me and her had a much easier time following the Rusyn dialects than standard Ukrainian (although they were by no means completely comprehensible). I could try. This list focuses on common languages widely thought to be at least partially and mutually intelligible. Or as an English speaker, you might catch the gist of some Scots. by Christine Ro. We also participate in other affiliate advertising programs for products and services we believe in. An academic paper has been published making the case for a separate Balachka language. How come you have not done a post about 9/11 before Robert? For example, Dutch speakers tend to find it easier to understand Afrikaans than vice versa as a result of Afrikaans' simplified grammar. 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. Intelligibility between Balachka and Ukrainian is not known. In brief, there is some mutual intelligibility, enough to have a simple conversation of the 'me Tarzan - you Jane' type, speakin. Also I have a long article coming up as a chapter in a peer reviewed book being published out of Turkey. The German influence is more prominent in the west; Polish influence is greater in the east. All Rights Reserved. The problem is that native speakers can understand other speakers of their own language. Its spelling, however, is quite different from any of them. 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. 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). She doesn't speak any Polish so it's going to be an interesting challenge. However, in terms of vocabulary Ukrainian is closer to Polish, from which it has borrowed a large number of words. Also, danes and swedes have a hard time understanding each other, but they can read the others language quite well. In 1933, reforms were forced that streamlined Ukrainian more in line with the Russian language. As such, spoken Danish and Swedish normally have low mutual intelligibility,[2] but Swedes in the resund region (including Malm and Helsingborg), across a strait from the Danish capital Copenhagen, understand Danish somewhat better, largely due to the proximity of the region to Danish-speaking areas. Frequency of exposure is one of the main causes of this. The main difference is in the ortography. Slovene has some commonalities with the West Slavic languages. In its written form Bulgarian is even more different than in its spoken form. 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. In essence, such kinds of bilingualism also improve understanding of other, unrelated Slavic languages, since two Slavic languages fill in the comprehension gaps. In addition, Balachka language associations believe it is a separate language. 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. 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. 0%? That is ~90% our language. > Intelligibility problems are mostly on the Czech end, because they dont bother to learn Slovak, while many Slovaks learn Czech. Kajkavian differs from the other Slavic lects spoken in Croatia in that is has many Hungarian and German loans (Jembrigh 2014). You cannot simply separate the articles from the words during a regular conversation. It is not true at all that Ukrainian and Russian are mutually intelligible, as Russian only has 50% intelligibility of Ukrainian. But which languages in the world are actually closest to . Thus, this exposure gives them an edge when trying to understand Czech. Was he from Belgrade or Novi Sad or Nis? There can be huge differences between spoken/written forms of a Slavic language, because the written form may have a very similar vocabulary, phonology and grammar, but due to a different, strong stress, you wont understand almost anything. These 4 main Polish dialects are: Greater Polish, which is spoken in the west of the country. Those 12% in Polish are very dubious as well. I think the OP exagerated a bit. Intelligibility testing between East and West Slovak would seem to be in order. The thesis that Bulgarian and Macedonian are the same language is not real in the practice. This is a Chakavian-Slovenian transitional lect that is hard to categorize, but it is usually considered to be a Slovenian dialect. Therefore . An inherent pure inherent intelligibility test would involve a a speaker of Slavic lect A listening to a tape or video of a speaker of Slavic Lect A. Why not look em up on his site. More properly, their speech is best seen as closer to Macedonian than to Bulgarian or Serbo-Croatian. Vedle hlavn, pouvan v Bulharsku, existuje jet makedonsk norma, kter tak (?) Method: It is important to note that the percentages are in general only for oral intelligibility and only in the case of a situation of a pure inherent intelligibility test. wovel a shifts to o not shits hahhaha sorry. The distance of Slovene may seem unlikely, but I think that it is still rather optimistic, because Czech and Slovene are quite distant, despite geographical closeness. Communication about such things is significantly impaired at this level. What if akavian person is from dalmatian coastal village which is now half tokavised and tokavian speaker is from Dalmatian city which still has some elements of akavian, ikavian yat and is full of romanisms? The grammars of sign languages do not usually resemble those of spoken languages used in the same geographical area; in fact, in terms of syntax, ASL shares more with spoken Japanese than it does with English. Most of the Ukrainian speakers who do not speak Russian are in Canada at the moment. I have friends from Bulgaria and I can tell you that they have problems by understanding some things. The main Shtokavian dialects of Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian are mutually intelligible. Istorieskoto mu razvitie se charakterizira s etiri glavni perioda. Im Czech . Molise Croatian is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. Click here to get a copy. Mutual intelligibility between languages can make learning them much easier. Czechs claim only 10-15% intelligibility of Polish. Conclusion: Ja u da radim is a form more related to Macedonian and south eastern dialects of Serbo-Croatian. Look at this Polish girl: can take anywhere. If you choose to study a language thats mutually intelligible with one you already know, chances are youll have to put a lot less work in than if you were learning a language from scratch. Ni Torlak has six vowels the standard /a e i o u/ and a reduced schwa // thats found where a strong yer once used to be, as in dog and sadness (this vowel has merged with /a/ in Serbian, but the two yers were kept as separate reflexes /e o/ (merging with those full vowels) in Macedonian) with phonemic and morpho-lexical stress that has plenty of grammatically conditioned shifts. People who live in border regions have an advantage of speaking two languages and can easily comprehand other ones as well. I use Ethnologues list of languages and dialects, but extend it a bit. Usually, they can even write their theses in Slovak. What is the most mutually intelligible Slavic language? PS More than half of Slovenian seems to be closely related to Kaikavian and Chakavian Croatian (and probably Old Shtokavian which is almost extinct). Basically, you only hear a series of consonants with hardly recognizable vowels. People from Lviv and larger cities and towns in western Ukraine have a slight clipped accent but they speak standard Ukrainian. Mi povidamo Horvatski jazik means We speak croatian language in akavian. JohnUK. On the one hand, Belarussian has some dialects that are intelligible with some dialects of both Russian and Ukrainian. These three languages have an 86% lexical similarity; that is, they share 86% of the same words. This is because colloquial Ukrainian is closer to the Ukrainian spoken in the Soviet era which had huge Russian influence. 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. Scots and English are considered mutually intelligible. Kids speak both languages, as well as English, fluently. Femke Swarte studied the mutual intelligibility of twenty Germanic language combinations. So you are a speaker of Southern Chakavian, right? These figures were tallied up for each pair of languages to be tabulated and were then all averaged together. Vitebsk, Belarus. Serbs until recently where still self titled Yugoslavs. Generally, when foreigners say speakers of a certain language speak too fast, speakers of that language can hear that fast speech just fine. uses the Cyrlic script, and a Banat norm, which uses the Latin script. @AJ Map; Russia's Periphery* Baltic States. I think (as a native Serbian speaker from south eastern Belgrade) the main difference between Serbian and Macedonian is that Macedonian doesnt have cases and have definite articles as well. Thread starter Bamaro; Start date Feb 15, 2023 . Northern Germanic languages spoken in Scandinavia form a dialect continuum where two furthermost dialects have almost no mutual intelligibility. If the central varieties die out and only the varieties at both ends survive, they may then be reclassified as two languages, even though no actual language change has occurred during the time of the loss of the central varieties. For instance, in 1932, Ukrainian g was eliminated from the alphabet in order to make Ukrainian h correspond perfectly with Russian g. After 1991, the g returned to Ukrainian. French has a reasonable degree of lexical similarity with Italian,Sardinian, Romansh, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish, making it partially mutually intelligible with these languages. Pannonian Rusyn is actually a part of Slovak, and Rusyn proper is really a part of Ukrainian. Grammar, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. I have read a book from Fraenkel/Kramer I believe or something similar, which said (according to some empiry) that Macedonians were easily switching to Serbian in comparison to Slovenes who stuck to their language in the time of Yugoslavia. In my experience, its quite easy. In fact, I would probably have a hard time to understand a Czech speaking with such an intonation. "A New Methodology for Romance Classification". 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. Answer (1 of 4): Yes. Rather than 95%, or 85%. Russia) in Canada, and they barely can understand standard Ukrainian. 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. 5%? Sorry I can`t give you percentage. When I visited Bulgaria I tried to communicate in Serbian language with the Bulgars. 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). This is not the case, as all figures were derived from estimates by native speakers themselves, often a number of estimates averaged together. But I can tell you this. For instance, Portuguese and Spanish have a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility, but theyre technically separate languages. I am communicating very often with speakers of the other Slavic languages, so I did an experiment and I tried to write something in Bulgarian for one first time. 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 For instance, akavian Croatian is not intelligible with Standard Croatian. The Mutually Intelligible Languages of 8 Popular World Languages 1. I admit that my prehistoric learning of Russian (1985-1990) made it easier for me to guess the meaning of words izpolzovana a saestvuvat (which have the same meaning in Russian), but I think that I could guess it even from the context. Bulgarian and Macedonian can understand each other to a great degree (65-80%) but not completely. A western Slovak can even understand most of Ruthenians hen they are speaking. The Answer, and Examples for 8 World Languages. 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. Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? 60%? In terms Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). Despite all of this, Ukrainian and Russian aren't the closest languages in the Slavic language family, and they're not even mutually intelligible. Rusyn ~ Ukrainian . But they would learn it quickly if they cared. Probably, ja u da radim for Bosnians and Croatians sounds very Serbian. If youre learning multiple languages at once, pairing similar languages is a great way to maximize your studying. It is true that Western Slovak dialects can understand Czech well, but Central Slovak, Eastern Slovak and Extraslovakian Slovak dialects cannot. It exists in differing degrees among many related or geographically proximate languages of the world, often in the context of a dialect continuum. Russian influence only ended in 1878. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world. 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. In writing, German is also somewhat mutually intelligible with Dutch. Please listen and watch the movie Zona Zamfirova. Do you speak Ukrainian. They sometimes say that youngsters do not but that is just a myth. For example, those who learn Ukrainian will eventually know 70% of Polish lexicon and a . 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. Zona Zamfirova is the movie in a Serbian dialect, but I dont understand it as same as I dont understand Macedonian or even more so, that is more like Bulgarian with the hard vowels. 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). I grew up as a Ukrainian speaker in North America. 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 ? 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). This is not necessarily correct in terms of vocabulary, but you will find a lot in common in the grammatical rules . I am afraid you are not right because if you take Serbian dialects till Nis, then they are very mutually intelligible with Macedonian! What languages are mutually intelligible with Russian? 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. Have every heard of Dubrovnik dialect? There is much nonsense floating around about Serbo-Croatian or Shtokavian. 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. Ukrainians can understand Russian much better than the other way around. Since then, Slovak has been disappearing from the Czech Republic, so the younger people dont understand Slovak so well. Although the standard view is that Balachka is a Ukrainian dialect, some linguists say that it is actually a separate language closely related to Ukrainian. Ukranian: 20% Scientific intelligibility studies of Czech and Slovak have shown ~82% quite high but still low enough for them to be closely related separate languages and not dialects of one language. However, many of these dialects are at least partially mutually intelligible. 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. If, for example, one language is related to another but has simplified its grammar, the speakers of the original language may understand the simplified language, but less vice versa. Slovenian speakers find it hard to understand most of the other Yugoslav lects except for Kajkavian Croatian. Hence the figures are averages taken from statements by native speakers of the languages in question. . That being said, the line between a language and a dialect is often blurred.