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> Because Americans are so good at distinguishing Slavic languages by ear in a noisy room? There is a simpler explanation: Russian is probably the only Slavic

> Because Americans are so good at distinguishing Slavic languages by ear in a noisy room? There is a simpler explanation: Russian is probably the only Slavic language most Americans know about.

viraptor 2y ago
Unfortunately it's just due to the number of people. It's unlikely a random person could tell a difference between Polish and Russian, much less Ukrainian and Russian.
- dralley 2y ago
  I doubt many Russians can tell the difference between Ukrainian and Polish either. I unironically think that some of them convinced themselves they were fighting Polish mercenaries just because they heard western Ukrainian accents.
  - stychos 2y ago
    I doubt most of Ukrainians knows Ukrainian language.
    - racional 2y ago
      This is meant in jest, of course.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - fishnchips 2y ago
      Not a Ukrainian but I know a good few. The language is taught at schools so you if you’re not educated in the Soviet Union you will know it. Whether you choose to use it is a different matter. And data would suggest that the usage is on the rise.
      - sam_lowry_ 2y ago
        I've been in Ukraine last year and one thing I noticed that while people speak in Russian or in a dialect in private, they instantly switch to Ukrainian in public, like when ordering an ice cream from the street stall. They then switch back among them. It's fascinating how things changed in a few years.
        stychos 2y ago
        That what I mean above, most people don't speak "modern Ukrainian". Even the language itself drastically changed on TV just in years.
      - DiscoDays 2y ago
        > if you’re not educated in the Soviet Union you will know it My grandparents and parents and siblings all learned Ukrainian in school during Soviet times. This is in what now would be considered a predominantly Russian-speaking part of Ukraine btw.
      - stychos 2y ago
        Ukrainians should pray to USSR because of active Stalin times ukrainization.
    - goodcanadian 2y ago
      If only there were some way of fact checking such a claim . . . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine
  - rodary 2y ago
    Not true. Hearing Ukrainian for the first time, if you're Russian, sounds like you're hearing a Russian dialect you never heard before but understand 90% of, bar some words you've never heard. The languages are that close. Polish, otoh, would baffle a Russian at first, you'd grasp quite a bit but you know you're hearing a foreign language, Slavic but foreign.
    - racional 2y ago
      Yup - Polish is in a different family (Western Slavic), with lots of unknown words and a different phoneme density that immediately lights up as "foreign".
    - poushkar 2y ago
      There is a bigger lexical distance between UA and RU than between UA and PL: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/a-map-of-lexical-distances-between-europes-languages/ https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/a-map-of-lexical-distances...
      - racional 2y ago
        Nifty diagrams, but they should be taken with a huge grain of salt of course. For example it shows EN/DE and EN/NO as having equivalent distances (49) when obviously EN/DE are much closer than either is to NO (in any holistic comparison of the three languages). It also shows IT/FR as being significantly closer (31) than IT/SP (40) when that's also plainly not the case -- again if we consider the distance between respective language pairs holistically (which includes a whole lot of other factors like phonemic footprint, meter, etc). In short this reads like pretty much the kind of post one would expect from a "brain candy" site like this. Less harshly (assuming good indent on the author's part), it demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on a single score (which in itself can be subject to all kinds of weighting and sampling biases) simply because it's a "score" and we're all supposed to be "data-driven" in our analyses these days. But again -- nifty diagrams, and they do at least give a feel for the topic of mutual intelligibility and language distance (even if the scores themselves don't seem to be particularly meaningful).
    - fishnchips 2y ago
- vidarh 2y ago
  I'm Norwegian. For my first few years living in the UK people regularly asked if I was Polish when they heard my accent. It seems a lot of people just try to map an accent to one of a very few stereotypes whether or not it fits, and if it doesn't they assume [nationality they've recently read about]. It changed to Romanian - which notably sounds nothing like Polish - after the papers moved on to worrying about Romanian immigrants.

> Because Americans are so good at distinguishing Slavic languages by ear in a noisy room? There is a simpler explanation: Russian is probably the only Slavic language most Americans know about.

viraptor 2y ago

Unfortunately it's just due to the number of people. It's unlikely a random person could tell a difference between Polish and Russian, much less Ukrainian and Russian.

dralley 2y ago
I doubt many Russians can tell the difference between Ukrainian and Polish either. I unironically think that some of them convinced themselves they were fighting Polish mercenaries just because they heard western Ukrainian accents.
- stychos 2y ago
  I doubt most of Ukrainians knows Ukrainian language.
  - racional 2y ago
    This is meant in jest, of course.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - fishnchips 2y ago
    Not a Ukrainian but I know a good few. The language is taught at schools so you if you’re not educated in the Soviet Union you will know it. Whether you choose to use it is a different matter. And data would suggest that the usage is on the rise.
    - sam_lowry_ 2y ago
      I've been in Ukraine last year and one thing I noticed that while people speak in Russian or in a dialect in private, they instantly switch to Ukrainian in public, like when ordering an ice cream from the street stall. They then switch back among them. It's fascinating how things changed in a few years.
      - stychos 2y ago
        That what I mean above, most people don't speak "modern Ukrainian". Even the language itself drastically changed on TV just in years.
    - DiscoDays 2y ago
      > if you’re not educated in the Soviet Union you will know it My grandparents and parents and siblings all learned Ukrainian in school during Soviet times. This is in what now would be considered a predominantly Russian-speaking part of Ukraine btw.
    - stychos 2y ago
      Ukrainians should pray to USSR because of active Stalin times ukrainization.
  - goodcanadian 2y ago
    If only there were some way of fact checking such a claim . . . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine
- rodary 2y ago
  Not true. Hearing Ukrainian for the first time, if you're Russian, sounds like you're hearing a Russian dialect you never heard before but understand 90% of, bar some words you've never heard. The languages are that close. Polish, otoh, would baffle a Russian at first, you'd grasp quite a bit but you know you're hearing a foreign language, Slavic but foreign.
  - racional 2y ago
    Yup - Polish is in a different family (Western Slavic), with lots of unknown words and a different phoneme density that immediately lights up as "foreign".
  - poushkar 2y ago
    There is a bigger lexical distance between UA and RU than between UA and PL: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/a-map-of-lexical-distances-between-europes-languages/ https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/a-map-of-lexical-distances...
    - racional 2y ago
      Nifty diagrams, but they should be taken with a huge grain of salt of course. For example it shows EN/DE and EN/NO as having equivalent distances (49) when obviously EN/DE are much closer than either is to NO (in any holistic comparison of the three languages). It also shows IT/FR as being significantly closer (31) than IT/SP (40) when that's also plainly not the case -- again if we consider the distance between respective language pairs holistically (which includes a whole lot of other factors like phonemic footprint, meter, etc). In short this reads like pretty much the kind of post one would expect from a "brain candy" site like this. Less harshly (assuming good indent on the author's part), it demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on a single score (which in itself can be subject to all kinds of weighting and sampling biases) simply because it's a "score" and we're all supposed to be "data-driven" in our analyses these days. But again -- nifty diagrams, and they do at least give a feel for the topic of mutual intelligibility and language distance (even if the scores themselves don't seem to be particularly meaningful).
  - fishnchips 2y ago
vidarh 2y ago
I'm Norwegian. For my first few years living in the UK people regularly asked if I was Polish when they heard my accent. It seems a lot of people just try to map an accent to one of a very few stereotypes whether or not it fits, and if it doesn't they assume [nationality they've recently read about]. It changed to Romanian - which notably sounds nothing like Polish - after the papers moved on to worrying about Romanian immigrants.