Is Bulgarian Similar to Russian? A Side-by-Side Comparison As a Polish native speaker I used to be sure that Czech and Polish are mutually intelligible until I met Czech couple. Czech and Slovak are simply dialects of this one tongue. And, as it was already sad, all Slovaks understand czeh better than czech slovaks thanks to hostory and politics. Salute from Czech republic. Additionally, some Arabic speakers may be familiar with Egyptian Arabic through the media, so they may rely on this to bridge any language gaps. Lach is a Czech-Polish transitional lect with a close relationship with Cieszyn Silesian. Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian have 10-15% oral intelligibility, however, there are Bulgarian dialects that are transitional with Torlak Serbian. Bulgarian: 15% spoken , 30-40% written Its vocabulary has lots of common words with all of Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, so it's sort of mutually intelligible with all of them. You are a smart guy. . 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. There is much nonsense floating around about Serbo-Croatian or Shtokavian. Answer (1 of 11): Look, if you're Ukrainian you most likely already speak russian. If one takes the transitional dialects which make a triangle between Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, one can say that it is also one language. (I will come to Bulgarian too). Most people in the region speak Russian with a few Ukrainian words. Western Slovak speakers say Eastern Slovak sounds idiotic and ridiculous, and some words are different, but other than that, they can basically understand it. uses the Cyrlic script, and a Banat norm, which uses the Latin script. Ukrainian and Russian only have 60% lexical similarity. I myself who have learned some Macedonian, pick up much more words from spoken Serbo-Croatian than spoken Bulgarian. Youre welcome Robert, for a non-slavic speaker, you have a pretty good grasp of these linguistic niceties. Kajkavian was removed from public use after 1900, hence writing in the standard Kajkavian literary language was curtailed. Belic) maybe do not understand Macedonian so well as Macedonian the Serbian language do (because of the according to you Bilingual learning . Pannonian Rusyn is spoken by a group of Rusyns who migrated to northwestern Serbia (the Bachka region in Vojvodina province) and Eastern Croatia from Eastern Slovakia and Western Ukraine 250 years ago. I work with Russians (dro. 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). There is . Ukrainian or Russian? Language gets political in Ukraine There is a big problem with this. Croatian (Stokavski): 98% It may seem that Polish and Russian are mutually intelligible because they both come from the same language family and share a lot of similarities. Belarussian almost completely comprehensible, except a few words. No, you cannot. In the army, fairly precise understanding of the meaning of the commands is required and it worked, without any formal language training. That is good to know. How to explain that? I do hope that you understand the point. And if you're perhaps a polyglot or linguaphile looking for a new challenge, then maybe learning a bit of Mandarin, Urdu, or even Persian might just be up your alley! However, Balachka is dying out and is now spoken only by a few old people. . Ukrainians and Belarusians understand each other's languages with no problem. Some islanders go even further than that and don`t consider themselves ethnic Croats. I can understand about 50% 75% of Bulgarian and Macedonian enough to get buy and carry on a conversation. There is an old Kajkavian-Chakavian dialect continuum of which little remains, although some of the old Kajkavian-Chakavian transitional dialects are still spoken (Jembrigh 2014). Im gonna estimate 40% for Bulgarian, cant really say what the difference between written and spoken Bulgarian would be for me. Femke Swarte studied the mutual intelligibility of twenty Germanic language combinations. Routledge. Re: Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian Mutual Intelligibility. 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. Now onto the discussion. Yet we speak of Kai/Cha as of Serbo-Croatian dialects, while Slovenian is totally foreign. Is Ukrainian closer to Russian or Polish? 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? A lect called iarija Slovenian is spoken on the Istrian Peninsula in Slovenia just north of Croatia. In essence, such kinds of bilingualism also improve understanding of other, unrelated Slavic languages, since two Slavic languages fill in the comprehension gaps. But despite similarities in grammar and vocabulary and almost identical alphabets, they differ sharply in many ways and are not mutually intelligible. Pretty accurate I think. 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. 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. Spanish has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with Galician, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Sardinian and French. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1n9KMawa-8 [1] However, many of these dialects are at least partially mutually intelligible. - Wikipedia Yet some say that the subtitles are simply put on as a political move due to Ukraines puristic language policy. The British Academy funded research project dedicated to examining mutual intelligibility between Karakalpak, Kazakh and Uzbek languages is currently under way at the, This page was last edited on 6 February 2023, at 16:40. Polish 5 % spoken, 20 % written Slovak 50 % spoken, 70 % written This is great. It has been massively updated with a lot of new research from controlled scientific intelligibility studies. However, Bulgarians claim to be able to understand Serbo-Croatian better than the other way around. Can you give me a figure for how much of a Bulgarian text you can understand? 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. A more updated version of this paper with working hyperlinks can be found on Academia.edu here. So I understand Kajkavians and Slovenes except for a germanic package. Other then that difference is in grammar and accent. Every major language has some dialects Also both sides are able to use standard Slovak. In addition, the two groups have different cultural norms and values. What is the most mutually intelligible Slavic language? For example, all Russian shows get subtitles on Ukrainian TV. The standard view among linguists seems to be that Lach is a part of Czech. 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. 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. They understand almost nothing. Due to no prior exposure to Russian, I could not understand that language, other than a few words and expressions here and there. Therefore I would go with 25%. Hence the figures are averages taken from statements by native speakers of the languages in question. Thread starter Bamaro; Start date Feb 15, 2023 . In writing, however, Scots language looks similar to English (albeit with some spelling variations). Although even if they stuck to Polish/Ukrainian, they'd probably still understand each other. Northern (Istrian and Kvarner) akavian is closer to kajkavian and Slovene then Southern akavian is ( I understand 95%+ n). Slobozhan Ukrainian speakers in this region find it easier to understand their Russian neighbors than the Upper DnistrianUkrainian spoken in the far west in the countryside around Lviv. As a result, I, who spoke fluent Ukrainian when I moved from Ukraine 18 years ago, have problems following modern speech on TV. 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). Many Ukrainian-speakers consider the language . Save. I think that nowadays people from Ni also dont understand that Serbian enough. Intelligibility problems are mostly on the Czech end because they dont bother to learn Slovak while many Slovaks learn Czech. General. There is much nonsense said about the mutual intelligibility of the various languages in the Slavic family. Even little kids who watch the show understand. 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. This understanding can be in spoken or written communication. Czechs see Slovaks as country bumpkins backwards and folksy but optimistic, outgoing and friendly. Asymmetric intelligibility refers to two languages that are considered partially mutually intelligible, but where one group of speakers has more difficulty understanding the other language than the other way around. How can you mesure intelligibility by using one single person. It is difficult to get a high-paying job that requires skill and . Have every heard of Dubrovnik dialect? True science would involve scientific intelligibility testing of Slavic language pairs. Rusyn ~ Ukrainian . do is the same verb (prim/pri/pri/primo/prite/pre vs. pravam/pravi/pravi/pravime/pravite/pravaat; as opposed to Serbian raditi) Polish: 5% Still others (for example, Voegelin and Voegelin 1977) recognize just two main dialect groups: Eastern and Western Ukrainian. 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. Are Polish and Ukrainians mutually intelligible? - Quora Burgenland Croatian, spoken in Austria, is intelligible to Croatian speakers in Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, but it has poor intelligibility with the Croatian spoken in Croatia. It forms a single tongue and is not several separate languages as many insist. How much Slovene can your average Chakavian speaker understand? For instance, Portuguese and Spanish have a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility, but theyre technically separate languages. Personal communication. Saris Slovak has high but not complete intelligibility of Polish, possibly 85%. 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. . Yes of course.