Re: Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian Mutual Intelligibility. I have also friends from Central Macedonia (Prilep, Bitola) and I can tell how different they speak from the Skopjian dialect. 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. Therefore I would go with 25%. http://www.izviestija.info/izviestija/, I was born in Canada to a Serbian family and speak Serbian so I am a good control as I was never formally educated in Serbian and its grammar. 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. Russian is also 85% mutually intelligible with Belarusian and Ukrainian in . 50% 0%. Croatian-Shtokavian is only a dialect of Serbian language. Its spelling, however, is quite different from any of them. For example, British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) are quite different and mutually unintelligible, even though the hearing people of the United Kingdom and the United States share the same spoken language. But akavian being archaic it has old slavic package. Molise Croatian is a Croatian language spoken in a few towns in Italy, such as Acquaviva Collecroce and two other towns. I cant say that I would understand every word, but it is usually not difficult to guess some missing gaps from the context, so I could read professional books in Bulgarian in the past. I can understand about 50% 75% of Bulgarian and Macedonian enough to get buy and carry on a conversation. 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. Mi povidamo Horvatski jazik means We speak croatian language in akavian. 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. In terms of pronunciation, Ukrainian or Southeastern Yiddish can be considered to occupy an intermediate position between Northeastern and Central Yiddish. I also understand more of other Slavic languages then neotokavian speakers do. Hello everyone, His wife had never been to Poland and her language was completely foreign to me. Thats why in the Czechoslovak army the rule was: speak your own language, understand both. Then she asked me to go do something useful, so this is all I can contribute with. Also there have been some czecho-slovak shows in TV lately like Czecho-Slovak Idol or Talent with judges and competitors from both countries and I have never heard of anyone who would complain about not understanding. One way to look at Macedonian is that it is a Serbo-Croatian-Bulgarian transitional lect. Pobrzajte in Serbian means (pourite) but I understand it because brzo means fast and prefix po also exists in Serbian, and the imperative form is the same. My gues. He conducts his interviews in Macedonian, and as you can watch , his guests, be they bulgarians, serbs, bosnians, croats have no trouble understanding his questions. Silesian or Upper Silesian is also a separate language spoken in Poland, often thought to be halfway between Polish and Czech. They have more in common than you might think! 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. The only big one i disagree with your breakdown is serbian/croatian vs bulgarian. Same question, how much Chakavian can your average Shtokavian speaker understand in percentage? 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. Nevertheless, the ISO has recently accepted a proposal from the Kajkavian Renaissance Association to list the Kajkavian literary language written from the 1500s-1900 as a recognized language with an ISO code of kjv. Complaints have been made that many of these percentages were simply wild guesses with no science behind them. Nice article, but I think there is a difference between spoken mutual intelligibility and different languages. Its often said that Czechs and Poles can understand each other, but this is not so. Slovene has some commonalities with the West Slavic languages. Toj e oficialnijat ezik na Republika Balgarija i edin iz 23-te oficialni ezika na Evropejskija sajuz. Macedonian 40 % spoken, 60 % written 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. However Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are not like Czech and Slovak. http://www.network54.com/Forum/84302/thread/1284248981/last-1288620675/The+real+9-11+cover+up-+Political+hijacking++was+originally+aimed+at+Russia. I just didnt realize that when you talked about learning the other language you were actually referring to the errors inherent in doing a non-virgin ears MI study, and not conflating language learning with mutual intelligibility. Because so many Slavic languages are national languages, they tend to have pretty big populations. It is true that Czech is more urban and less folk and many Slovaks study in Czech republic. When it is relatively symmetric, it is characterized as "mutual". Intelligibility among languages can vary between individuals or groups within a language population according to their knowledge of various registers and vocabulary in their own language, their exposure to additional related languages, their interest in or familiarity with other cultures, the domain of discussion, psycho-cognitive traits, the mode of language used (written vs. oral), and other factors. Woof woof! Polish and Russian while Slavic sounding to my ear and is maybe 5%-15% intelligible . A Moravian Czech speaker (Eastern Czech) and a Bratislavan Slovak (Western Slovak) speaker understand each other very well. Bulgarian has 80% intelligibility of Macedonian, 41% of Russian, and 5% of Polish and Czech. Intelligibility testing between East and West Slovak would seem to be in order. Usually, they can even write their theses in Slovak. The reason there are subtitles on Russian-language shows in Ukraine is because of Ukraines puristic state language policies. Learning a language becomes fun and easy when you learn with movie trailers, music videos, news and inspiring talks. Spoken Slovenian is a surprise too its phonology has a significant German influence. Ja u da radim is more common to Serbian speakers but ja u raditi is officially more correct. I would like to add an interesting fact Slovenian has very harsh dialects due to the historic separation of different regions. Many Silesian speakers now speak a watered down version of Silesian which is more properly seen as a Polish dialect with some Silesian words. Although Chakavian is clearly a separate language from Shtokavian Croatian, in Croatia it is said that there is only one Croatian language, and that is Shtokavian Croatian. 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. He printed out the paper and showed it to his colleagues at the next meeting, and they spent some time discussing it. Nobody Ive ever talked to that lived in Serbia had anything other than [u] for //. ????? When you find out it is a separate language, you ask for %, and they often tell you! Kajkavian, especially the ZagorjeKajkaviandialect around Zagreb, is close to theStajerskadialect of Slovene. Often the two languages are genetically related, and they are likely to be similar to each other in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, or other features. The translation is not very problematic. I use Wikipedia as a reference for new languages that Wikipedia misses, like the 4 Croatian languages. Macedonain and Serbo-Croatian being 25% inteligible is simply not true. The fact that such process works is almost a definition of mutual intelligibility for me. A more updated version of this paper with working hyperlinks can be found on Academia.edu here. It may have been split from Polish for up to 800 years, where it underwent heavy German influence. Serbs/Croats used to live in the south Poland and they moved south to the current location. I've ne. Kashubian itself is a macrolanguage made up of two different languages, South Kashubian and North Kashubian, as the two have difficult intelligibility. Score: 4.1/5 (68 votes) . I hope you will like it and will be useful for your researches! The Chinese language, on the other hand, is comprised of a number of dialects that arent always mutually intelligible. French has a reasonable degree of lexical similarity with Italian,Sardinian, Romansh, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish, making it partially mutually intelligible with these languages. 15), Part II", "Intelligibility of standard German and Low German to speakers of Dutch", "Cross-Border Intelligibility on the Intelligibility of Low German among Speakers of Danish and Dutch", "Mutual intelligibility of Dutch-German cognates by humans and computers", "Morpho-syntax of mutual intelligibility in the Turkic languages of Central Asia - Surrey Morphology Group", "Kirundi language, alphabet and pronunciation", "Tokelauan Language Information & Resources", "Majlis Bahasa Brunei Darussalam Indonesia Malaysia (MABBIM)", "Indonesian-Malay mutual intelligibility? For example, the varieties of Chinese are often considered a single language even though there is usually no mutual intelligibility between geographically separated varieties. but they are often mutually intelligible. 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. According to Ethnologue, there are more than 7,000 languages in the world, with some being more difficult to learn than others. Most people in the region speak Russian with a few Ukrainian words. Czech 20 % spoken, 40 % written She doesn't speak any Polish so it's going to be an interesting challenge. You cannot simply separate the articles from the words during a regular conversation. Personal communication. They are essentially speaking the same language. My gues. I am a good control for this because I am an American but my father is Slovak(my mother is half Slovak but American) and I can understand about 50 % of Slovak and I do have a hard time with Czech but once I get past their hacek r I can understand quite a bit.