Bulgarian and macedonian surely appear to be separate languages, as far apart as polish and slovak. Serbian is a tonal language, plus the accent on the syllables is fixed especially in 2 slb words which makes it a very predictable language. University of groningen mutual intelligibility in the slavic. In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. I have serious doubts about the mutual intelligibility between slavic languages. In fact, uygur probably differs less from turkish than some dialects within germany and italy,for example. Macedonian sounds also pretty mutually intelligible with serbian to me.
Pdf mutual intelligibility between west and south slavic. If you become fluent in serbian, than youll also be fluent in croatian and vice versa. Mutual intelligibility and surprisal in slavic intercomprehension. From psycholinguistics and computational modeling we know that lg proc. This thesis explores mutual intelligibility in the slavic language area how to. Mutual intelligibility among the slavic languages by robert lindsay the mutual intelligibility mi of the languages of the slavic family is an interesting topic because many are mutually intelligible to one degree or another. Torlakian considered a subdialect of serbian old shtokavian by some has a significant level of mutual intelligibility with macedonian and bulgarian.
During the protobaltoslavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes slavic and baltic the closest related of all the. In this video we are testing polish serbian mutual intelligibility. If written down there can be some mutual intellegibility, spoken hardly any. Mutual intelligibility chart for the slavic languages.
Either there are no reliable sources on mutual intelligibility or the people working on this article have no way of accessing them. Instead of similarity, we could also use the inverse concept of distance, in which case, the greater the distance between two languages, the smaller their degree of mutual intelligibility. I spent the first 6 years of my life in ukraine and grew up speaking russian and english russian was the main language of ukraine back then, these days i dont speak it natively anymore but i still know my fair share of russian. English czech polish bulgarian russian preliminary results. Jason needs to get off his lazy ass and help me with the site. Introduction in the 1990s, after the fall of communism, the main language of yugoslavia, serbocroatian, has disintegrated into three or four standards. There are conflicting reports about the mutual intelligibility of turkic languages, but still, they differ much less among each other than say,the germanic or romance languages. Factors explaining intelligibility a model of intelligibility. In a cloze test both texts and individual words are. Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in europe pdf.
Mutual intelligibility in slavic language specific. The degree of mutual intelligibility between language vari. Pdf mutual intelligibility of languages in the slavic. Mutual intelligibility in the slavic language area 66 3. In answering this question, i will honour a soviet tradition that i always hated starting a book, an article, a lecture, whatever, with a citation from marx or engels. Spanish,yielding20languagepairsandslavic bulgarian,croatian,czech,polish, slovak,slovene,i. Slavic language mutual intelligibility best, people. Russian has a quite high degree of intelligibility with bulgarian,possibly on the order of 75%. For example, could a russian and a bulgarian understand each other just talking their native languages. Measuring crosslinguistic intelligibility in the germanic. Measuring crosslinguistic intelligibility in the germanic, romance. How mutually intelligible are the various slavic languages. Macedonians closest relative is bulgarian,with which it has a high degree of mutual intelligibility. Czech, slovak, polish, croatian, slovenian and bulgarian on the level of lexicon, orthography.
Russian has a quite high degree of intelligibility with bulgarian, possibly on the order of 75%. These mutually intelligible languages will make you do a. It is sometimes used as an important criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used. In the present study we tested the level of mutual intelligibility.
Bulgarian and macedonian are mutually intelligible between 80% and 90%, as are czech and slovak. The main dialects of croatian,serbian, montenegrin and bosnian are apparently mutually. University of groningen mutual intelligibility in the. Orthographic and morphological correspondences between. Under colonialism, thailand was an independent kingdom, but laos was under french rule.
Mutual intelligibility of slavic languages yahoo answers. Prior to the codification of standard macedonian, macedonian dialects were described by linguists as being either dialects of bulgarian or serbian. Bosnian, croatian and serbian shtokvakian of course can understand each other. In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which. But again, this is a separate discussion from mutual intelligibility.
After the breakup of yugoslavia, serbocroatian, defined as the common language of serbs, croats, bosniaks and montenegrins, officially split into three mutually intelligible languages serbian, croatian and bosnian. Its important to note that mutual intelligibility is highly subjective. Is the difference as far apart as the germanic languages, or. Mutual intelligibility between west and south slavic languages. Slavic languages descend from protoslavic, their immediate parent language, ultimately deriving from protoindoeuropean, the ancestor language of all indoeuropean languages, via a protobaltoslavic stage. Ussr divided the central asian turkic speech communities into separate languages. Mutual intelligibility among slavic languages antimoon forum. If i were to decide, i would limit the article to an explanation of the term mutual intelligibility, give one or two examples and simply delete all the rest of it.
Nadia is helping me test polish bulgarian mutual intelligibility. But the reason for that maybe cause in southeastern serbia we speak the prizrentimok dialect which is kinda similar to macedonian, but also bulgarian. Pdf mutual intelligibility of languages in the slavic family robert. Crc 1102 project c4 models for mutual intelligibility march, 2015 1416. The modern south slavic languages form a continuum of a series of mutually intelligible dialects. In the present study we tested the level of mutual intelligibility between three west slavic czech, slovak and polish and three south slavic languages croatian, slovene and bulgarian. Mutual intelligibility of languages in the slavic family. How can the mutual intelligibility between closely related languages be measured. Serbs speak much faster than russians, and an average russian wouldnt understand a word of serbian when they speak, because its just too fast, ev. In addition, the differences between the slavonic dialects are so great that. Macedonian is closely related to and shares a high degree of mutual intelligibility with the bulgarian and serbian languages.
Note how close both czech and slovak are to polish and slovenian. Bosnian is one of three such varieties considered official languages of bosnia and herzegovina, along with croatian and serbian, and also an officially recognized minority or regional language in serbia, montenegro, and the republic. Finally, we demonstrated that despite the high linguistic similarity, speakers of serbian and croatian. The question then becomes which features and which adaptation procedures one needs to consider. Mutual intelligibility means two people can understand each other when speaking. Mutual intelligibility between west and south slavic.
Mutual intelligibility between west and south slavic languages 63 1. Hes the site administrator and i am waiting for him to give me some site tools i. I am serbian native speaker, and i can say that the serbian and all other south slavic languges are very mutually intelligible, onley with bulgarian could be a little problems. Pdf mutual intelligibility between west and south slavic languages. Its often said that all slaviclanguages are mutually intelligible with each other. These mutually intelligible languages will make you do a double take. Serbian cpc je, srpski jezik belongs to the south slavic group of the slavic branch of the indoeuropean language family.
It is commonly believed that all slavic languages are fully mutually intelligible, which implies that they are close. Dialectology, obviously, is the study of dialect and dialects. It is the official language of serbia, coofficial in the territory of kosovo, and one of the three official languages of bosnia and herzegovina. Note also how close serbian is to slovenian and macedonian. Mutual intelligibility among the slavic languages beyond. Mutual intelligibility of languages in theslavic family. We therefore expect crosslanguage intelligibility between slovene and croatian to be asymmetric and in favour of serbiancroatian. The results show that in most cases, a division between west and south slavic languages does exist and that west. In addition, it is a recognized minority language in montenegro, where it is spoken by the relative majority of. Orthography in language modeling of mutual intelligibility. Lexical and orthographic distances between germanic. Cannot measure mutual intelligibility many languages fail the test of mutual intelligibility standard languages and governments impact what is a language and what is a dialect. Not sure about other languages, but russian and ukranian are very mutually intelligible. Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages.
Bosnian is one of three such varieties considered official languages of bosnia and herzegovina, along with croatian and serbian. The two endpoints, slovene and bulgarian, are not mutually intelligible, but the transitions from serbian croatian to macedonian and bulgarian to macedonian are gradual and mutual intelligibility is high. Within this research program, a largescale webbased intelligibility test is performed, including cloze tests and word translation tasks. Results from,566 participants were analyzed for the 70 withinfamily combinations of speaker. The ukranian language shares some vocabulary with the languages of the neighboring slavic nations, most notably with polish, slovak in the west and belarusan, russian in the north and the east. It is also an officially recognized minority language in serbia, montenegro, north macedonia and kosovo. Between sources, you might find some claiming that two languages are mutually intelligible, while other sources claim those same languages arent. Bulgarian macedonian serbian russian belarusian upper. Mutual intelligibility wikimili, the best wikipedia reader. Dialects, that is, can be regarded as subdivisions of a particular language. Are serbian and russian mutually intelligible languages. Last voicesson sesler robert lindsay mutual intelligibility of l. The whole issue concerning mutual intelligibility between serbian and bulgarian revolves around the pronounciation.
Pdf in the present study we tested the level of mutual intelligibility. I know russians and ukrainians, and poles and czechs can understand each other fairly well, but how easy can too different families of slavic languages understand each other. To what extent are different slavic languages mutually. Having a large body of recognizable vocabulary is a necessary condition for mutual intelligibility, but it is nowhere near sufficient.
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