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What language do people speak in the Balkans, anyway? (2019)
- some1else 6y agoAn interesting trait of the balkan languages is the perceived link between the spelling and phonetics, resulting in the phrase "Piši kao što govoriš" / "Write as you speak"
- forinti 6y agoThat's nearly the same as Russian. Are they mutually intelligible?
- jakupovic 6y agoSomewhat intelligible. If the Russian speaker is speaking slowly, one may get 20-30% of the meaning, from the Balkan side. If the people are really trying to communicate, they will probably just use English.
- bnt 6y agoBalkan person here: I can (mostly) understand anyone from Eastern Europe (Slovakia, Czechia, Russia) if they speak really slowly and use basic words and phrases.
- kspacewalk2 6y agoRussian is not a very phonetic language. However, unlike English, the mismatches are somewhat consistent, e.g. an adjective in masculine gender and accusative case ends with -ого (-ogo), which is pronounced (-avo/-ava), but at least it's always pronounced -avo/-ava.
- st1x7 6y agoNo. You'll likely be able to read if it's another Cyrillic language and you'll also pick up individual words. It's similar to an English speaker reading French - they won't understand the meaning but many of the words of latin origin will stand out.
- dmitriid 6y agoNot really. IANAL(inguist), but it sort looks like this: Russian has progressed/evolved more than many of the other Slavic languages (due to more speakers, being a part of an empire etc.). So there are significant differences between Russian and most other Slavic languages (even the closest ones, Ukranian and Belorussian). These differences are everywhere: in word forms, tenses, stress, pronunciation etc. Many other Slavic languages (especially Balkanian) retain a lot of forms, sounds, meanings that are archaic by Russian standards: anything from Bulgarian `ъ` sound which disappeared from Russian centuries ago, to words like `лепа` (beautiful) in Serbian which hasn't been used in Russian for over a century, to words like Polish `uroda` (beauty) which switched its meaning to mean "ugly" in Russian. And the list goes on: locative and vocative cases exist in Serbian, haven't existed in Russian for a long time; definiteness of Macedonian and Bulgarian hasn't existed in Russian for a long time, if ever; etc. etc. So all in all, other Slavic speakers have a higher chance and luck understanding Russian speakers, than Russian speakers other Slavik languages.
- d1sxeyes 6y agoYou're right about the evolution, although locative and vocative do still exist in Russian in some specific circumstances. Locative example: в саду (vs о саде) Vocative example: Маш, иди сюда
- amaccuish 6y agoМаш is a new invention, not related to the original vocative, like боже
- d1sxeyes 6y agoThat's true. But it is still a vocative form.
- dmitriid 6y agoTrue. IIRC, some linguists say that you can still find up to 15 cases in Russian, if you look carefully. They mostly remain in some specific situations and can't be properly split into fully-fledged cases. But they are still there :)
- input_sh 6y agoIf you understand a little bit of any, you understand a little bit of both. That being said, Russian grammar is hard for a "Yugoslav" speaker, and people from here much rather learn English or German (or both, quite frequently) than Russian. I'd guestimate at least 10% speaks both English or German relatively fluently, and I personally don't know anyone from here that speaks Russian fluently.
- brummm 6y agoSame as German. I wonder if actually English is just the exception and most other languages have this "rule"/trait.
- zaat 6y agoBonjour Monsieur, la langue française veut vous parler.
- 1-more 6y agoFrench is pretty good in my limited experience of having one way of pronouncing a written word (although I'll give you that Monsieur breaks all the rules). But for going from speech to writing it's no good. "Trois vers verts traversent vers le verre" comes to mind.
- zaat 6y agoThe rule was "write as you speak". There are some words in French where the rule apply, "avec" for example, but they are the exception.
- 1-more 6y agoI flipped that didn't I? Damn. Good point.
- fanf2 6y agoFrench is one of the few languages where competitive dictation is a thing. Like a spelling bee but with more puns.
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- jaclaz 6y ago... and all Latin/Romance languages, English is the exception, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian are all pronounced as they are written (or at the most with some always-the-same reading conventions).
- disown 6y agoTheir spelling bee competitions must be boring then.
- zo1 6y agoI think the concept would be entirely alien to them. Imagine trying to explain it to them for the first time.
- ivanche 6y agoYou're right, it is totally alien. I still remember when I had started learning English, I was completely baffled why would somebody use double letters, or sometimes pronounce one letter one way and sometimes (same letter!) the other way...
- dragandj 6y agoThere are no spelling bees here. We learn to read and write (with two alternate scripts, Latin and Cyrillic) in the first grade, and that's it. It's easy, unless someone has dyslexia, or a similar condition.
- justiceforsaas 6y agoBalkan countries can't seem to agree on this question as well. There's a current dispute between Bulgaria and (North) Macedonia. Basically, Bulgaria is not willing to recognize the Macedonian language, with their vice-prime-minister recently saying it's the "Esperanto language on the Balkans". They're also veto Macedonia's EU membership negotiations. It's an ongoing, heated discussion which has (unfortunately) caused hatred between the countries (North Macedonia and Bulgaria have been mostly friendly between each other in the past).
- gt565k 6y agoMacedonia has a large ethnic Bulgarian population by origin. The running joke of Bulgarians is that Macedonians are really Bulgarians with a fake history. It's no surprise, after the split of Yugoslavia, which had many different ethnic minorities. Eastern Europe is a brewing pot of cultural diversity and history. Macedonians regularly apply for Bulgarian citizenship if they can prove their origin is from Bulgaria, so as to get a backdoor into the EU, they get a Bulgarian passport. [1] Eastern Europe / the Balkans are pretty complex. They have been ruled by The first and second Bulgarian Empires, The Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Ottomans. [1] https://www.novinite.com/articles/112811/Bulgarian+Passports+for+Macedonians%3A+Debunking+Myths#:~:text=Bulgaria%20grants%20citizenship%20to%20Macedonians,could%20be%20eligible%20for%20citizenship https://www.novinite.com/articles/112811/Bulgarian+Passports....
- lou1306 6y ago> Eastern Europe / the Balkans are pretty complex. They have been ruled by The first and second Bulgarian Empires, The Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Ottomans. Pretty much sums it up, but you forgot the Most Serene Republic of Venice :)
- tpm 6y agoAnd also partly by Austria-Hungary and the Soviet Union who all left their marks.
- pvg 6y agoThe languages and dialects in the blob referred to as 'Serbo-Croatian' are much, much more closely related to each other and generally mutually intelligible in contrast to even neighbouring languages like Slovenian and Macedonian. And of course, many people in the Balkans speak far less related languages - Albanian, Romanian, Greek, Turkish, etc.
- knuthsat 6y agoThere’s also Kajkavian language and language of Hvar/Brač islands (lots of Italian words) which aren’t even understandable by the majority of Serbo-Croatian population.
- 1-more 6y agoYeah inside of Croatia itself there's a split between the former Venetian parts and the more inland parts. I know that when I guessed "hleb" (like Russian) for bread in Split I was told that that was a word for it but would mark me as an inland Croatian speaker. I can't remember the actual bread word they used, but Wiktionary leads me to believe it might have been "kruh." Hopefully Cunningham can help me out here.
- pvg 6y agoHah, yes, I don't mean to downplay the diversity within the geographic region in which Serbo-Croatian languages are spoken.
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- w0mbat 6y agoMy friend's brother who studied the language at Cambridge always called it "Serbo-Croat", but "Serbo-Croatian" seems to have almost completely replaced that term over the years.
- pp19dd 6y agoOn the other side of that coin, roughly in the 90s over there people started picking frequent fights over the order of the two words. Some wanted Croat-Serbo variant (hrvatsko-srpski). Others shrugged as they were neither and didn't have a horse in the fight. But the stunning absurdity that captures living over there in the era was when Croats and Serbs demanded UN provide them with translators for negotiations. With earpieces and everything. Just months prior, they spoke the same language. In the same government buildings.
- dmurray 6y agoGetting translators for your preferred language is an acceptable form of government grift. The EU intends to employ 50 people to translate EU legislation into Irish [0]. That's not something that has any direct benefits: there's no one who can read Irish legalese better than English. It does have some second-order effects: if you consider it's culturally valuable to promote and preserve the Irish language, one great way to do that is to provide well paid jobs for people who learn it. [0] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/european-commission-seeking-50-irish-language-translators-1.4172960 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/european-...
- jakub_g 6y agoSimilar but on the regional level in Spain: valenciano (Valencia region) and catalan (Catalonia) are nearly identical dialects, but due to local pride reasons, people claim they are totally separate languages.
- enriquto 6y agoThis does not seem to be accurate, in my experience. I've never heard an actual speaker of the language (or of either language, if you want), claiming that they are two separate languages. If anything, there is a tension regarding certain choices in the standardization of the orthography that are sometimes claimed to be Barcelona-centric and disregard the Valencian way of speaking. This may be true, I'm not a linguist to judge; but it might certainly justify having separate entries in e.g., websites, just like one often sees for american and european spanish and french, or for brazilian and european portuguese (which nobody claims are separate languages). Anyhow, the speech in the cities Tortosa and Castelló (on both sides of the purported boundary between the languages) is nearly identical, and very different from that of, say, Barcelona or Girona.
- c2xlZXB5Cg 6y agoThe way you say "coffee" while understood by all sides, embeds enough information to determine your ethnicity/religion/nationality/place of birth and is weaponized for political use. The truth is, people understand each other just fine. Pushing for giving a name to "the common language" or enumerating how many "different languages" exist has little to do with linguistics.
- flobosg 6y ago> The way you say "coffee" while understood by all sides, embeds enough information to determine your ethnicity/religion/nationality/place of birth This is also true, to an extent, for words meaning "tea". https://qz.com/1176962/map-how-the-word-tea-spread-over-land-and-sea-to-conquer-the-world/ https://qz.com/1176962/map-how-the-word-tea-spread-over-land...
- Someone 6y ago“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...) After Yugoslavia fell apart, “they speak a different language” was used as an argument for creating different countries.
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- russtrpkovski 6y agoZdravo to my fellow Macedonians in this thread :)
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- tin7in 6y agoYears ago I saw for the first time the word "balkanization" being used by people not from the Balkans (I'm not a native English speaker). It was quite surprising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkanization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkanization
- input_sh 6y ago...and despite a fairly common misunderstanding, it doesn't originate from the Yugoslav wars. It predates those wars by a hundred years, originating from small independent states that emerged as Ottomans were losing control over the territory.
- rurban 6y agoBut they are still united by their common language. Even if they heavily deny it, and write in different letters. And call their little dialect a full blown independent language. Semiotic slavistic researchers really need to be more politicians than researchers, it's a minefield still.
- medo-bear 6y agoRegarding Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin (done in order of population size)... native speaker here. These are four names for one and the same language - in a sense that American, Canadian, British, and Australian are the same language. What one says they speak is usually indicative of the nationality they choose to belong to. Those that say they speak Serbo-Croatian are usually those that in some sense identify as Yugoslavian or "undeclared" with respect to nationality. Curiously, Yugoslavian (meaning south slavic) as a language never officially existed, although this would probably best describe it. In ex-Yugoslavia there is a rather pronounced distinction between citizenship and nationality. In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) this distinction is actually enshrined into the constitution. Moreover, in BH all official documents must be translated into 3 constituent languages. As a funny example of this see how cigarette packets look in BH [1]. In all three instances they say exactly the same thing. NOTE: Cyrillic alphabet, as used in Serbia, has an isomorphic relationship to the Croatian latin alphabet (this same latin alphabet is official in the Serbian "language" too, although it is not called Croatian). To get an entertaining idea about how complicated things are in BH see [2] or [3]. [1] https://www.globaltobaccocontrol.org/tpackss/share-pack/pack/4368/drina-bosnia-and-herzegovina-4368 https://www.globaltobaccocontrol.org/tpackss/share-pack/pack... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO0rEwwyB0g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO0rEwwyB0g [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCEYDdMue-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCEYDdMue-8
- sgnnseven 6y ago> In ex-Yugoslavia there is a rather pronounced distinction between citizenship and nationality. As a Yugoslav war refugee, this is spot on. Small sidenote: Even if all of these languages are effectively one big "super-Balkan" language it is a _very_ divisive point from an ethnicity perspective given the number of conflicts this region has had over the centuries. While it's not my cup of tea, the reality is that people from the Balkans will often judge others from that region (both positively and negatively) based on these almost-imperceptible language differences since they signal to the listener some degree of ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic level, and education level.
- mushbino 6y ago
- type0 6y ago> What language do people speak in the Balkans, anyway? South-slavic, is it not?
- ardit33 6y agoAlbanian, Greek, Romanian are not Slavic languages at all. This article should be nammed: "What language do people in former Yougoslavian countries speak" More than half of the Balkans are no slavic.
- type0 6y agoYes but the article mainly focuses on the slavic languages, Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Bosnian are there any more non-extinct south slavic languages that can be considered as one pluricentric language?
- input_sh 6y agoSlovenian is fairly close, and you can probably lump in Bulgarian and Macedonian in there as well. On one hand, I'd consider it a stretch for Bulgarian/Macedonian and Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian to be considered the same language. On the other, there's also Torlakian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torlakian_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torlakian_dialect), a dying dialect that's been shared between Serbians/Bulgarians/Macedonians around the border. It's considered to be a dialect of both Serbian and Bulgarian, depending on who you ask, really bluring the line between the two.
- type0 6y agoOne interesting language that is somewhat uniting in the Eastern Europe is Church Slavonic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Slavonic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Slavonic For the pronunciation it is much closer to serbocroatian than bulgarian of today which seems strange.
- domano 6y agoWell if i talk to somebody from croatia in germany i will call it "naš" (our language). I am from Bosnia (technically also i am a Bošnjak, which is the main ethnicity in Bosnia population-wise) and identify as a Yugoslav, but have German citizenship :) So it is a bit difficult to explain. Especially since someone can be born in Bosnia/Croatia and be a Serb or vice versa
- kyuudou 6y ago> Especially since someone can be born in Bosnia/Croatia and be a Serb or vice versa A famous historical example of this would be Nikola Tesla, no?
- domano 6y agoYes, but at that time it was still part of Austria :) So you had a Serb born in Croatia, which legally was Austria. Doesn't get more confusing than that nationality-wise.
- smilic 6y agoWell Tesla was born in 1856 - so if Croatia was Austria, then Serbia was the Ottoman Empire at the time :) His family lived in the area of modern day Croatia for hundreds of years. Nikola visited Serbia only once for 31 hours in total. Yeah - its totally confusing. If Nikola was not Croatian after his family living in the area of Croatia for 500 years, how is Novak Djokovic Serbian for just being born in Serbia (while his parents are from Montenegro and Croatia)? :)
- necovek 6y agoArticle touches on this: concept of a nation vs citizenship is a relatively new one (late 18th century with the rise of state-nations). One can argue the usefulness of any of those distinctions, but there is going to be some genetic and some cultural part to the "nation" definition (around the Balkans, it's been the religion more than anything else to define a nation — like language, I would consider that a cultural component). You seem to be going strictly for the geographical distinction (with time a contributing factor), but that's in opposition to how nations are defined everywhere (otherwise, it's all Croatians in Croatia today and there wouldn't exist any "Irish Americans", even with Americans being already a mash-up special nation). In Serbian people try to make the distinction by using "Srbi" and "Srbijanci" (citizens), basically Serb vs Serbians, though it is a linguistic stretch (just like we've got Bosniaks/Bošnjaci for a nation to oppose it to Bosnians/Bosanci which includes anyone from Bosnia and Herzegovina).
- ardit33 6y agoIt is a good article, but the name is misleading. Albanian, Greek, Romanian are not Slavic languages at all. There is also Turkish, and few other minor languages spoken. This article should be named: "What language do people in former Yugoslavian countries speak" More than half of the Balkans are not slavic. As for slavic languages: Croatian and Serbian are pretty much the same, and Bosnian is similar close enough. Slovenian is slightly different, then there is Bulgarian. Macedonian is just a dialect of Bulgarian language. Non slavic languages: Albanian - Isolate of indo-european languages (its own branch) Greek - its own branch of indo-european languages Romanian - Latin branch, with some Dacian (less than 2%) Other Minor Languages: Turkish, Romani Variants, etc - (aka, i.e. not to be confused with romanian, but it is an indian origin language) As for the whole peninsula, they share a lot of common words due to the ottoman empire's past, which is called a Balkan Sprachbund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund Even they might share some words, name of objects, or food dishes, A Greek, an Albanian, a Slavic, and a Romanian person will not be able to understand each other at all.
- isakkeyten 6y ago> Macedonian is just a dialect of Bulgarian language. Yeah no.
- qpiox 6y agoAt this moment there is only one physical border we have. Planet Earth. Please work and build understanding towards ascending above all borders, both physical and mental. I am a homo sapiens, a living being from this Universe. Born on the Planet Earth. My mother and father were also homo sapiens. Their mothers and fathers too. Several million generations before, their mothers and fathers were some types of primates, who knows. I respect the languages my mother and father and their mothers and fathers spoke and taught me, but I do not want to be limited to those. Therefore, I also tried to learn few other languages. To name some well-known: English. Deutsch. Italian. Basic. Pascal. C. C++. Forth. Modula II. Logo. Lisp. Fortran. Cobol. Java. Javascript. Probably few more that I don't remember :) Some of them I only studied on paper, without any direct opportunity to apply it in real life. I studied those, just for the sake of studying. I love to listen to people speaking in many languages and I love when people use many dialects of the same language, that are so different to each other that they barely understand themselves. Diversity should be considered a blessing.
- LudwigNagasena 6y agoAll of that sounds pretty cool, especially if your only focus on diversity is limited to the food you eat and the songs you listen to. But the only real thing that makes it possible for people to live together is uniformity. Same language, same customs, same expectations, at least same calendar. It seems to be absolutely laughable that people from anglophone countries nowadays love to talk about diversity when they are unable to find a common ground with their rural compatriots and all their “diverse” friends are the same middle class people grown up on Hollywood movies and Rowling books.
- qpiox 6y agoIt was an extrapolation on Socrate's quote “I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."
- exabrial 6y agoIn that picture, crt mini tv in the top left
- ljosifov 6y agoNative Macedonian speaker here, born and lived in the country the 1st XX years of my life, living in an English speaking country for the last YY years now. Two data points. Episode 1. Growing up I picked up Serbian/Croatian without knowing, from comic books, movies (never synchronized, foreign movies subtitled only), songs and books. Got the surprise of my life 1st time I went to Belgrade (while in high school). I could understand everything spoken, I could read too. They could not understand a word I was speaking in Macedonian. And I spoke their language really badly, laghably so. ;-) It was funny. When I visit my old home, I have the impression that the youth nowdays don't understand Serbian/Croatian as much as we did. Episode 2. Sometime in the 90-s, I went to Sofia to see the city for the 1st time. I bought bunch of Computer Science books, the likes of The Art of Computer Programming and similar. Some bits I could understand, but all of the computer related words were translated in Bulgarian (from their English forms) and I had hard time following. Some works I could guess (remember the term for computer keyboard was similar to what we use for a piano keyboard), but looking up and translating sapped my enthusiasm for CS. :-) These days sometimes when I hear "Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian", I give a news site like https://www.dw.com/bg/ https://www.dw.com/bg/ a try, to see what I can understand. I recognize lots of words, the meaning of simpler sentences, news on current events news that I already am familiar with. Longer more complicated sentences, or themes I am not familiar with, I do struggle, to get the meaning of what is written.