Are Polish and Ukrainian mutually intelligible? 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! The Polish langauge uses the Latin script, while the Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic. Intelligibility testing between East and West Slovak would seem to be in order. Most of the Ukrainian speakers who do not speak Russian are in Canada at the moment. 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! It was a long time ago though, so Ill try to convince her (and maybe a couple more Russians) to try this again tonight. (j/k) 2. Intelligibility data for Saris Slovak and Ukrainian is not known. Kajkavian was removed from public use after 1900, hence writing in the standard Kajkavian literary language was curtailed. He alleges that Sheikh later double-crossed British intelligence. Ive almost never heard it in Lviv, except by visiting villagers or old people. The written languages differ much more than the spoken ones. 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. General. No there is not. When you find out it is a separate language, you ask for %, and they often tell you! 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. The more the better. Lemko is spoken heavily in Poland, and it differs from Standard Rusyn in that it has a lot of Polish vocabulary, whereas Standard Rusyn has more influences from Hungarian and Romanian. That is good to know. Some famous linguists who are acquaintances of mine (they have Wikipedia pages) told me that they thought that 90% was a good metric. Email me and give me your name please and I will use you in the paper. The grammar in both languages is similar, but, predictably, there are a few differences: While Ukrainian includes the past continuous tense, there are only three tenses in Russian (past, present and future). Torlakians are often said to speak Bulgarian, but this is not exactly the case. I have no problems understanding the Torlakian dialect. Thus, this exposure gives them an edge when trying to understand Czech. Yet its totally foreign to many in Croatia. The syntax is though very very similar! Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in . 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. Polish, Ukrainian and even Serbo-Croatian dialects are less so, especially in the light of their geographical spread . The Answer, and Examples for 8 World Languages. In this case, too, however, while mutual intelligibility between speakers of the distant remnant languages may be greatly constrained, it is likely not at the zero level of completely unrelated languages. Most native speakers agree on MI. Because they use different alphabets, German and Yiddish are only mutually intelligible when spoken. Re: Rus/Ukr It is very strange when some words are not understood, although the communication is possible. 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. Macedonian: 50-60 % As a Polish native speaker I used to be sure that Czech and Polish are mutually intelligible until I met Czech couple. Is Ukrainian mutually intelligible with Polish? Then she talks about the cards in the bags, I again understand everything, but at 0:47, another stream of unintelligible sounds is starting. [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]. However, it appears to be a separate language, as Lach is not even intelligible within itself. You cannot simply separate the articles from the words during a regular conversation. But despite similarities in grammar and vocabulary and almost identical alphabets, they differ sharply in many ways and are not mutually intelligible. While Norway was under Danish rule, the Bokml written standard of Norwegian developed from Dano-Norwegian, a koin language that evolved among the urban elite in Norwegian cities during the later years of the union. Russian has low intelligibility with Czech and Slovak, maybe 30%. Most people in Slovenia learn Serbian language so it is hard to estimate the real mutual intelligibility between Slovenian and Serbian language. Lesser Polish, which can be heard in the south and southeast. Intelligibility in the Slavic languages of the Balkans is much exaggerated. It features phonemic vowel length that came about as a coalescence of a vowel with a following /v/ (usually one /v x j/ in Serbian, the distribution is opaque and unpredictable) or the contraction of the sequence /ij/ into /i:/ this feature is shared with plenty of Macedonian dialects, as far as I remember but has traditional, harder Serbian alveopalatals and palatals, having [t d t d] for Macedonian [t d c() ()] (treating these as allophones as they seem to be the same four phonemes). The overall lexical similarity between Spanish and Portuguese is estimated to be 89%. How is it possible if they speak the same language? Therefore I would go with 25%. 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. However, leaving aside Kajkavian speakers, Croatians have poor intelligibility of Slovenian. Poles who know German and Old Polish can understand Silesian quite well due to the Germanisms and the presence of many older Polish words, but Poles who speak only Polish have a hard time with Silesian. Hello, the difference of course is completely arbitrary, but above 90%, most speakers regard their comprehension as full or say things like I understand it completely. Below 90%, it starts getting a lot more iffy, and down towards 80-85%, people start saying things like, I understand most of it but not all! and people start regarding the other tongue as possibly a separate language. 2 Ukrainian Phrasebook And Dictionary Paperback 1-03-2023 Mutually Intelligible? BULGARIAN (transferred to the Latin script): algarskijat ezik e indoevropejski ezik ot grupata na junoslavjanskite ezici. the use of the accusative is nearly identical in Ni Torlak and Kumanovo Macedonian (cannot say the same for standard Macedonian as it has no accusative to begin with) and is, in general, more of an oblique case than anything else Often the two languages are genetically related, and they are likely to be similar to each other in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, or other features. Scots and English are considered mutually intelligible. Personally Im a Taoist in relation to 9/11, the middle way, you know? Not everyone within each of the three broad dialect areas speaks Yiddish in the same way -- there are sub-dialects, but they are mutually intelligible. 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. How do they arrive at these estimates? Young Czechs and Slovaks talk to each other a lot via the Internet. Price, Glanville (1971), French Language: Present and Past, Jameson Books, Pope, Mildred K. From Latin to French, with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman. Much like Nordic languages. Slovenian while it sounds slavic to me is not intelligible at all save for a few words here and there. Mutual intelligibility with varieties of Serbo-Croatian is hindered by differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, Kajkavian being the most mutually intelligible. Russian influence only ended in 1878. But despite similarities in grammar and vocabulary and almost identical alphabets, they differ sharply in many ways and are not mutually intelligible. between Ni Torlak and Macedonian than between either of those two and Serbian Polish is not intelligible with Kashubian, a language related to Polish spoken in the north of Poland. The intelligibility of Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian is highly controversial, and intelligibility studies are in order. Im Czech . Ni Torlak vowel reflexes are otherwise in line with standard Serbian and Northwestern Macedonian, deriving nuclear /u e i e u r/ from / y * *l *r/; some Torlak dialects towards Kosovo or Bulgaria instead have [l ~ l] for /l/ (giving [v()l(:)k] where Serbian normally has [v:k]) but none in my vicinity. 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 "". 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. Bulgarian is similar to Macedonian but with more different cyrillic. Thats why in the Czechoslovak army the rule was: speak your own language, understand both. Of course, the interviews are subtitled in Macedonian, but even an untrained ear and eye can see how similar these languages are. Some Poles say they find Silesian harder to understand than Belorussian or Slovak, which implies intelligibility of 20-25%. Nared s osnovnata, izpolzovana v Balgarija, saestvuvat oe makedonska norma, kojato sao izpolzva kirilica, i banatska norma, kojata izpolzva latinica. In addition, political and social conventions often override considerations of mutual intelligibility in both scientific and non-scientific views. 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. 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. . 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. I believe The truth is that a person can often understand other dialects, except his native one. Conclusion: 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. Finally, understanding mutual intelligibility gives you helpful insight into the history of a language. 0%? If you speak Russian, you might be surprised at how much Ukrainian you understand. There is a group of Bulgarians living in Serbia in the areas of Bosilegrad and Dimitrovgrad who speak a Bulgarian-Serbian transitional dialect, and Serbs are able to understand these Bulgarians well. I cannot understand that much of kajkavski nor akavski, but I can understand more akavski than I can kajkavski. The Czech law even states that Slovak language can be used in schools and in official documents. About Boyko/Hutsul dialects which according to you are more understandable to Russian person than Ukrainian language I will disagree with you. Kajkavian is probably closer to Slovenian than it is to Chakavian. This is not the case, as all figures were derived from estimates by native speakers themselves, often a number of estimates averaged together. . We speak in our own, or we speak locally. In other words, Ukrainian speakers can often understand Russian, while Russian speaker doesn't understand Ukrainian, especially Russian speakers from outside Ukraine. 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 . Upper Dnistrian is influenced by German and Polish. President Musharraf of Pakistan says that the CIA has secretly paid his government millions of dollars for handing over hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects to America.. 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. I am a native Spanish speaker but my girlfriend is Macedonian. Do you speak Boyko or Hutsul? Its grammar is close to that of Russian. Czechs hardly ever study at Slovak universities. True science would involve scientific intelligibility testing of Slavic language pairs. As a native Russian speaker, I noticed that my understanding of Polish went from 20% to 70% in a matter of hours when watching a film in Polish with subtitles. Ukrainian and Russian only have 60% lexical similarity. About Slovak being two different unintelligible languages I highly doubt so. Hence, Russians understand the colloquial Ukrainian spoken in the countryside pretty well, but they understand the modern standard heard on TV much less. Polish 5 % spoken, 20 % written Other then that difference is in grammar and accent. There are new scientific figures for Czech-Slovak, Czech-Serbo-Croatian and Czech-Bulgarian. But akavian being archaic it has old slavic package. Sorry I can`t give you percentage. What Are Mutually Intelligible Languages? In akavian they are once more old slavic. In the evening of the first day it reaches 93%, in a week 95%, all unsupervised, almost effortlessly, just by being there, watching, listening, talking and asking for an explanation here and there. [2], Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible,[3] although there are also similarities among different sign languages. Thank you very much for this. Chakavian actually has a written heritage, but it was mostly written down long ago. Some say it is a part of Czech, but more likely it is a part of Polish like Silesian. For example, Dutch speakers tend to find it easier to understand Afrikaans than vice versa as a result of Afrikaans' simplified grammar. Serbo-Croatian has variable intelligibility of Macedonian, averaging ~55%, while Nis Serbians have ~90% intelligibility with Macedonian. 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. 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. Polish is spoken outside of Poland by Polish diaspora groups in countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Can a Russian speaker understand Polish? Bosnian and Montenegrin are also just dialects of Serbian language. Colloquial Ukrainian spoken in most of the country is pretty much comprehensible to Russians. Buzet is actually transitional between Slovenian and Kajkavian. Pannonian Rusyn is actually a part of Slovak, and Rusyn proper is really a part of Ukrainian. Even little kids who watch the show understand. If I tell them few sentences (phrases) in Boyko dialect, then Russians wont be able to understand at all. Subtitles are absurd when 99% of the audience can already understand whats going on. Those 12% in Polish are very dubious as well. Same question, how much Chakavian can your average Shtokavian speaker understand in percentage? They say, ~60%, ~65%, etc. Yes and if you could more than one listener, it would be great. Reactions: So far there have been few reactions to the paper. So I understand Kajkavians and Slovenes except for a germanic package. I met Croats from Zagreb and they speak Slovenian perfectly. There is as much Czech literature and media as Slovak literature and media in Slovakia, and many Slovaks study at Czech universities. Student Authored Website. Only Croatians try so hard to press differences. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc, or its affiliates. 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. The Aegean Macedonian dialects mostly spoken in Greece, such as the Lerinsko-Kostursko and Solunsko-Vodenskadialects, sound more Bulgarian than Macedonian. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11185-015-9150-9 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.