What Makes Each of the Slavic Languages Unique (Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and more!) 

Being Polish and having played League of Legends in Czech, I strongly believe that mutual intelligibility is by far the best feature of Slavic languages.

Yeah I'm Polish, I went to Czech on holiday and we spoke Polish and everyone understood us. We mostly understood Czech but a few words were different. Everyone understood one another. xd

Hi, thank you for the video. I'm Czech, I was born in Czechoslovakia and I have to say Czech and Slovak languages were never considered the same language. They were (and still are) considered "mutually intelligible" but definitely not the same. It was that way because everyone was exposed to both Czech and Slovak on a daily basis, mainly on TV, in books etc. so people generally understood the other language but they generally couldn't actively speak it without mistakes, they would instead often come up with made-up words or phrases that would only "sound Slovak" to them but that were not truly Slovak 😉 I had a similar problem when I had to study Russian as a kid at school (before the Velvet Revolution in 1989), sometimes I wasn't sure if I used a genuine Russian word or if I only accidentally made something up in my head that sounded vaguely "Russian" to my Czech ears 😁(since both languages use similar words here and there).

As a bulgarian, I can only say to those who want to learn our language "Thank you for your interest and sorry for making it difficult for you."

I’m a Taiwanese who have learned English, French, Japanese and Czech (and my native language: Taiwanese and Mandarin of course). By far, Czech is the hardest one to me. However, Czech people are very friendly to foreigners like me who are learning Czech! Not like in some countries people would be mean to you if they sense your accent, Czech are patient to beginners most of the time! That’s a crucial reason for me to keep on my Czech learning given that it’s really a hard language to me.😊😊😊

Русских субтитров не было, поэтому я как истинный любитель хардкора включил украинские и начал переводить и с украинского и с английского языков однавременно.

double negative is more like typical for Slavic languages in general not just individual Slavic languages

I'm Serbian, and I live in Spain where at one point I enrolled in Spanish classes. The teacher was part Serbian, so he was also able to explain to me specific Spanish grammar rules that got many students confused. He pointed out how Serbian has been heavily influenced by Latin grammar (due to being part of the Roman Empire) so we incorporated some grammatical structures, which the Russian and English students in the class were not able to comprehend (like reflexive verbs or those two different futures). I normally translate from English to Spanish in my head, but my teacher told me that it is better to translate from Serbian as the grammatical structure is more close to that of Spanish.

Czech and Slovak were deffinitely not considered the same language during the existence of Czechoslovakia. Also, Czech might be somewhat significantly influenced by latin, but its often striking when other Slavs talk to the Czechs how many archaic words the language presserved that even other slavic languages lost long time ago. Deffinitely true about the German infuence tho, Czechs always appreciated the short and easy German expressions, they make our rztrdrzzrtd conversations easier.

For Slovak language you may add letters as "ô" which a believe is pretty unique and when compared do some other slavic languages, also "ä". There's also a rhythmic law/rule meaning two long syllables cannot occur consecutively (which includes also those with ia/ie/iu/ô ) although there are minor exceptions here and there, ofc. That's just from the top of my head, I may add some more, if I remember to :)

Interesting video. Just a note - even in times of Czechoslovakia, Czech and Slovak were not considered as one language. For some time, the official language was the virtual "Czechoslovak language", which had two varieties: the Czech one and the Slovak one. It didn't mean that they were one language though. Things were written in both languages, not only one. Both languages were present everywhere, because they were not the same language. The so called Czechoslovak language was nonexisten, it was an artificial name. Just like the Czechoslovak nation was artificial, nonexistent and created only to convince the world powers that both nations were actually one, that needed to have its own country. It was a trick.

For something unique to Slovak, someone already mentioned the rhythmic shortening, which is a rule that forbids two long syllables directly after each other. Long syllables are any syllables containing á, é, í, ó, and ú, as well as the four officially recognised diphthongs: ia, ie, iu, and ô (/uo/). The letter Ô is also unique to Slovak, and emerged after a reform which merged the /uo/ diphthong. Some examples of rhythmic shortening in Slovak (in contrast to Czech, which lacks this rule): Láskam (to the loves) - incorrectly láskám (this would be Czech) Skákanie (the jumping) - as opposed to the incorrect skákánie and the Czech skákání ĺ and ŕ are also considered long syllables: Tŕň (thorn), kĺb (joint). Other than the rhythmic shortening, Slovak also has a very extensive list of special words we call vybrané mená (lit. selected words). You see, in Slovak, the i and y vowels are read the same phonetically as /i/, but they have very distinct (and very annoying) grammatical role in words. They are called the the ‘soft i’ and the ‘hard y’. The soft i, if placed after a hard consonant (d,t,n,l), causes the consonant to soften. This is done in order to avoid writing too many unnecessary soft marks ◌̆. Additionally, the vowel e also works as a softener. De, te, ne, le, di, ti, ni, li would be pronounced /ďe, ťe, ňe, ľe, ďi, ťi, ňi, ľi/. For the record, seeing it written this is generally an eyesore and generally a very hard faux pas when it comes to standard Slovak writing. How does this connect to the selected words? Well, they are words which are specifically written with the hard y, and I’ve heard they are remnants from the past, so generally very old slavic words that simply had to be denounced into this category in order to preserve their original pronunciation. Examples: bylina (herb), umyť (to wash), rytier (knight) There’s lots of stuff I’m omitting, because Slovak grammar is giving everyone, including middle schoolers and middle aged mothers on Facebook very real nightmares, but that is the gist of it. Hope you liked my infodumping, and if not… well, just be happy you don’t have to learn Slovak in Slovak primary schools. Yeesh. I am still traumatised.

Corrections: Czech and Slovak were only *officially* considered to be one Czechoslovak language between 1920-1938, but afterwards considered to be different languages, even while Czechoslovakia was still around. The majority of people in Belarus *probably* don't speak Belarusian natively, but a majority of people think of Belarusian as their mother tongue, which is why so many people put it as native Old Church Slavonic has been attested since the 800s, the 9th Century, NOT the 1800s 5:35 should be плаваю instead of палаваю 11:18 “vskétat” should be “vzkvévat” 13:00 these all mean ear, not eye, eye is “oko”

One thing worth mentioning about Russian is that a lot of nouns have a form with a different suffix, in order to indicate that the nouns is small or “cute.” For example, “дорога”(road) would be changed to “дорожка” if you want to indicate that the road is small. Or “куб”(cube) would be changed to “кубик” for the same reason.

hi as a bulgarian, thank you for complimenting our flag, I agree it looks pretty nice and I'm proud to live in the country that uses it :)

the research that went into this is insane! One thing I would point out as Czech, "čau" is used as very informal, you'd say that to your friends not in a shop etc. At the end of the video, the goodbyes in all the languages are formal, Czech equivalent would be "Nashledanou" literally - wishing we see each other again / until we see each other again (which is the exact same meaning in most of the other languages too). Fun fact, you'd end a phone conversation with a similar "Naslyšenou" which replaces "see" for "hear"

Hello, i am Serbian. Its not Seta moje majke (My Mothers sorrow) but Tuga moje majke. Seta is word for reflecting some good memories best comparison is feeling nostalgic. On the other hand Tuga is literal sorrow, for example loss of someone or something or sorrow when you left your country to live somewhere else where is better source of income. Also we in Serbian have also double negation like Ja ne znam ništa "I dont know anything" similar to Russian.

I'm a Czecho-Canadian and I love anything to do with slavic linguistics. It was a great video! Thank you.

As a bulgarian I can admit that our language and culture are beautiful

For anyone who is also a nerd here are some interesting facts about the Bulgarian language. One that is often ignored, especially by foreign linguists but it's called Present Historical Time. It describes past actions in the present tense and it's mostly used, as the name suggests to describe historical actions. Example: България е основана през 681г. (Bulgaria was founded in the year 681.) Where we use the present е основана, instead of the past е била основана. What you described as evidentially is actually more complex and it refers to a lot of different tenses Past Complete Time is used to describe actions that have certainly finished before the moment of speaking. Past Incomplete Time is used to describe actions that have started in the past but the speaker is unsure if they have finished in the present. Past Uncertain Time is used to describe past actions which have been completed in an uncertain moment in the past but we can observe the result. Past Preliminary Time is used to describe actions that were completed before other past actions or a given moment. Then there are also the future tenses called Future Time, Future Preliminary Time, Future Time in the Past and Future Preliminary Time in the Past. Future is pretty self-explanatory. Future Preliminary time is used to describe a future action that will happen before another future action or a given future moment. Future Time in the Past is used to describe actions that would've happened in the past but didn't. It's considered a future tense because of the grammar used. Future Preliminary Time in the Past is used to describe actions that would've happened but didn't because of a specific actions or reason. It's a bit hard to understand if you don't speak the language. Another cool thing is the doubling forms, where a word has two official ways to be written or pronounced. Example: обеци, обици(earnings) Also I promise I won't bother you too much with dialects, mostly because Bulgarian dialects are a hundred times more complex than the language but I wanna mention that on top of regional dialects we have professional dialects used by people working in specific professions. They could range from people just using certain words such as Tricker dialect, used by professional criminals, to having a mixture of foreign and Bulgarian accents and grammar such as Computerdjiski dialect, to having artificially created accent specific for those professions, which is the case for actors, news presenters and PSA announcers. That accent is called Proper Speech and it was made to be the most comprehensible way to speak the language. Lastly even though old Bulgarian is considered a lost language (thanks Turks) from the little we could uncover it was very similar to Old Church Slavonic, to the point some linguists consider them the same. That also makes sense due to historical reasons and here comes a slight correction. The Glagolic was created with Slavs in mind and during Christianation Bulgarian churches originally adopted the Glagolic so they don't preach in Greek, but since Bulgaria was a multiethnic state Glagolic proved too hard for non-slavs so a simplified version of the Glagolic was created called the Cyrrilic by one of Cyrril and Methodius's students called Kliment of Ohrid.

Hi Serbian here!!! I just wanted to say something that might be interesting to those who dont speak serbian or croatian. Our language' s letters have all unique sounds they make and we add those sounds together to make words, meaning we know when we hear a word for the first time how to spell it (that is also the reason why we dont compete in spelling bee as kids). The important Serbian writer Vuk (or Wolf in English) Karadžić, who perfected the Cyrillic alphabet and added new letters, said: "Write as you speak, read as it is written." P. S Sorry if I have a few spelling mistakes.

"Ne" and "Не" working pretty same in every slavic language, you can use almost for every word in sentences, but there are differencies in writing like Czech writes it together "nebudu" and for example russian writes "не буду", meaning same

As a learner of Russian and Polish and general enthusiast of Slavic stuff, I got to say that this video addressed most of the issues I found with each specific Slavic language when travelling or learning them. What a great summary and with a touch of humour, I admit I was pausing it every few seconds to read the examples on the screen haha

Hi, I'm a native speaker of Russian, from Belarus, but can speak Belarusian too. The Belarusian part was very accurate, except there was a small mistake. The majority of people don't speak Belarusian natively, but a majority of people think of Belarusian as their language, which is why so many people put it as native. Similar to Ukrainian, g is pronounced ɣ, not g. The Russian new vocative case can also be used for non-kinship terms, like names. For example Оля (Olia) is said as Оль (Ol') sometimes.

An interesting but little-known fact is that Russian also has a past conjugation. It works on the principle "bylo" + verb in the past tense. Ja bylo podumal, Ja bylo sobralsia uhodit', etc. So it's worth saying that Slavic idioms are very close to each other, so the historical differences between languages ​​were much smaller than between literary standards now. And many dialects with their own special features, for example, the Russian dialects of the region of Novgorod and Pskov, as one of the most special Russian dialects. They are not considered separate languages, but in many ways they differ more than other East Slavic languages.

I’m glad you took time to see all our amazing languages! Greetings from Bulgaria ;))

I'm romanian and I love slavic languages. I am glad we have slavs as neighbours and that they influenced our language and culture, it would not be the same with it.

As a belarusian speaker I really enjoyed the video but I would like to add some corrections: Belarusian language has two main variants of orthography: modern one (Narkamaŭka) and classic one (Taraškievica), both are equally used and both have their own differences in spelling and writing. For example the word orthography would be "артаґрафія" (artagrafija) in Taraškievica and арфаграфія (arfahrafija) in Narkamaŭka or the same for a word philosophy: філязофія (filiazofija) or філасофія (filasofija). So the absence of a vocative case in belarusian is just partially true, because it is used in the classic variant and some use it in the modern one as well: "Пане-Гаспадару!" instead of пан and гаспадар, "Хлопча!" instead of хлапец/хлопец "Браце!" - брат "Мікалаю!" - Мікалай and so on Anyway, thanks for the video, it`s quite difficult to find information on this topic and it`s always nice when your language is mentioned somewhere :)

Ahaha I am Bulgarian and your description of its dubitative mood made me laugh out loud with pure joy. Very good description! The customary way we describe it to foreigners is "Бил съм се бил напил", which translates as "I was drunk, ALLEGEDLY". p.s. Now that I think about it, that statement is actually grammatically wrong, because it's doubly dubitative, so to speak.

I speak Ukrainian, Russian and Polish, hence I lived in Slovakia using mix of them to communicate with people, who don't speak English. Worked really well. I just said the same word in a different language, hoping it would resemble the same meaning in Slovak. I remember word "paradajki" - tomatoes, which totally differ from any known by me language. Hence, yes, it is true, knowing 1 or several you can understand and read in others. For me personally, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Slovak are the easiest one to understand and Slovenian is the hardest one.

There was also a very interesting Polаbian language in what is now northern Germany. This language died out in the 19th century, but a lot of information about it remains. It had a lot of German borrowings and sounds and it sounded very interesting.

The ending at 19:09 is funny since both Czech and Slovak have Čau and Zbohom (Sbohem in Czech). However "čau" means "bye", while "zbohom" means "farewell", so it seems like you are telling us a casual goodbye followed up by "we'll never talk to you again" :D

Very cool video, learning the history of slavic languages and why some words are different in other languages really makes it easier to further understand the languages. Thank you very much for making it, greetings from Bulgaria 🇧🇬

As a Russian native-speaker, I'd like to add that in addition to French borrowings, we have many words from German. Byustgalter (Büstenhalter), Bukhgalter (Buchhalter), Galstuk (Halstuch), Parikmakher (Parückmacher = Friseur), Schlagbaum, Buterbrod (Butterbrot), Lager' (Lager), verstak (Werkstatt), lozung (Losung), soldat (Soldat), shtraf (Strafe), Kurort (Kurort) etc. It happened to us because of the Empress Yekaterina II who was from Germany and encouraged German immigration to Russia. In fact, Germans was a significant ethnic minority in USSR. After its demolition they were enabled to leave for Germany and a lot of them did. But their presence is still reflected in out language. Thank you for video!

As a native speaker of Croatian, I think that the pluperfect is used more than the aorist or imperfect. All of these can be (and usually are) replaced with the normal past tense. Pluperfect is used only in some compound sentences when it is necessary to distinguish a specific meaning from the set of meanings simple past tense can convey. The aorist is used in some semi-fixed phrases, usually to imply the finality of the action and the imperfect is just straight up dead. Usage of aorist and imperfect tenses is considered "stylistically marked". For the vocabulary differences between standard Croatian and other standards, Croatian went through several linguistic purism movements over the last 150-ish years, which reflects in the vocabulary. In most cases where the vocabulary differs, you will see that Croatian has a word made of Slavic roots (sometimes a neologism, sometimes not), where as Serbian and the others will use a loanword, like in the examples for "carrot" and "history" in the video.

As a Slavic person natively speaking the Bulgarian language and trying to master Old Church Slavonic, some real good stuff man 😎

Wow, an informative video about the slavic languages that actually mentions *all* the living slavic languages and not just those who are national languages! Kudos!

as a slav, i find western languages very simple, like in english imperative is the same as infinitive, the words dont have tens of forms of how you can use them in sentences

I still remember the last time I was sitting on a mini van in Chiangmai, north Thailand, people beside me seemed came from one of the Slavic country, and also I heard some words that seemed to be Polish. After they passed the form to me for the accident insurance, I was quite happy to find out that their nationality was really “Poland”. This lead to some small talk, and while they said they came from Warsaw, I blurted out “Warszawa” in Polish pronunciation which a big smile, but instantly freaked out those four people who came from their capital😅 It turned to a nice trip, and they even let me try to pronounce their name printed on IC for a small quiz haha. Language exchange is always interesting, there’s always chances to meet someone who you can chat with by using the familiar language to you.

I am Polish and i remember playing with my cousin in slovak or some other slavic language and we understood almost everything except some of the words looked and sounded funny to us like "kilof" (pickaxe) becoming "krompac" or "jagody" (berries) becoming "bobule"

This makes me wonder how would this look with latin languages, great video, very informative, I'm trying to learn russian, and this showcases a lot of stuff I needed

the bulgarian section was so funny! I admit, our language is pretty difficult :)

I took Russian in college and my professor was a Polish lady who grew up during the USSR. She was an expert in Slavic languages and was fluent in pretty much all of them. It does help that they are pretty similar, but it was very impressive she spoke so many languages including English.

Thanks for such a detailed analysis! I never thought I'd say something like this, but I would really appreciate a longer version of this video with the same content but with more time to appreciate each language and the details :)

Let's be honest now, we all came here to see our native language, right? Pozdrawiam Polaków :)

Eu estou amando este canal. Me encanta aprender sobre idiomas.

Fantastic video. I'd love to see an update on Kashubian and Lower/Upper Sorbian languages ❤️

Proto-Slavic: *azъ Bulgarian: Az Slovene: Jaz Everyone else: Ja Bulgarian: Why are you all looking at me, I'm not the weird one

You forgot to mention the most important thing Serbo-Croatian language. It’s one of few lenguages that use the system for writing “Speak how it’s written”. Which means -every letter is one sound-

There is also mix of slavic languages! Its called Po naszymu and it is formed from. Czech, Polish and german language. It somehow takes the grammar from all these languages and is different in every city.

I'm a native Slovenian speaker, found this video by chance. I'm not a huge fan of languages, but maaaan, this is so in depth, you clearly put so much work into this I cannot even comprehend the scale. Amazing job! I can't say I understood everything, I don't even know how I can use what I saw today irl. Maybe I'll revisit this someday. It's also interesting to hear the English translations for our languages's particularities. For the one part I understood... you need to work on better translations, "uho" in Slovenian is ear, not eye XD

Also, Japanese also distinguishes distance in its pronouns. Once you learn it, it seems mind-boggling not to have, for example, a single word for "That over there near you" (sore) vs. "This here near me" (kore) and "That over there away from both of us" (are). In Japanese these pronouns can refer not only to objects, but also to events, mind-states/attitudes etc. It's very useful in presenting and manipulating perspective in your speech.

I'm making a slavic conlang as hobby, and I discovered after a while I tested it, that the sounds are a bit like a smooth polish/ slovenien language , I think. What makes it unique is that I eroded the case system to only genitive, there are "the" words but they adfix,and had tried to get rid of the moast clusters ,and there are many romance and other loans , the name is "jezí martienchi "

Awesome video! That's really surprising how much I didn't know about my own language! Some corrections for the russian part: 4:25 "Стой" rarely means "Stand!' and it usually means something like "Stop!" 4:47 Prepositional and locative cases are basically the same, or at least I haven't ever heard people distinguishing between them 4:50 Present tense transcription is a bit of a mess, it's more like "ja - lutšaja učenica v svojom klasse" Also worth noting that the letters я, е, ю, ё don't make the j sound most of the time (they only do so after other vowels, at the beginning of a word and after ъ and ь) The quality of the video is really fascinating, you definitely deserve way more subs

I'm from Slovenia and I'm happy to see our language being analysed in this video.

Fun fact: If you recall Life of Bryan, there is scene, where he improperly writes "Romanes, eunt domus" on the wall and is punished by passing centurion to correct it to "Romani, ite domum", which sounds extremely similar to Slavic version of the phrase. Czechs would say "Římané, jděte domů"

Slovak speaker here. Thank you for the well-made video (although the speed and amount of information is quite overwhelming). I'd say the diphthong "ô" is pretty characteristic of Slovak, as well as the crazy perfective/imperfective verb aspects. Also, I appreciate you calling the language "Slovak" instead of "Slovakian" which I often hear from some people.

A complex and informative guide to slavic languages. I love this video! This is literally something I was looking for

Salutations are weird in Slavic languages. Czechs say "Ahoy!" even though Czechia is landlocked. Poles say "Dzień dobry", which literally means "Good day", even though no day is ever good in Poland ;)

as someone who can understand russian and ukrainian from my parents and older family members but not speak it well, i felt really called out by some of the example sentences lol i always thought slavic languages can communicate more humor/meaning and i think it might be in part because of multidirectional verbs and such. thank you for explaining grammatical ideas and the differences between the languages! (i often get the two above confused TuT) now im motivated to learn them better :)

One thing that I find interesting and rarely discussed (not mentioned here unless I missed that) is that in Polish when there is a same letter occuring twice in a word (like 'inny') we pronounce the doubled letter twice. I don't know if this is the case only for Polish or all slavic languages, but speakers of non-slavic languages were really surprised when I told them about this.

I am from Poland from the silesia region and im so glad you mentioned silesian! although i wouldnt consider it a diffefent language, just a dialect.

I'm from Slovenia. I like that you talk about this languages. Good job!👏

Informative and interesting video. Mostly your research is excellent but I feel I must point out that Czech and Slovak have never been considered the same language. Mutually comprehensible with a bit of practice or study but not the same language.

I'm native speaker of Belarusian and Russian, and I speak Czech as well. That's a great video, and I really appreciate the work done by the author. It must have taken an effort, and the result is impressive. I was fascinated by it and recommended to my friends who study linguistics. I would like to add about Belarussian that we have a unique among Slavic languages semiconsonant 'ў' pronounced like 'w' in "cow", which is often used instead of 'л' or 'в' in similar words in Russian, e.g. воўк - волк (wolf), леў - лев (lion).

Idk why but when Slavic languages get some attention I become so happy :D Such a cool video❤

You could do a video like this exploring all the romance languages! There are lots of romance languages that aren't known, such as venetian, mirandese and asturian, and it would be interesting to see you talk about them.

An interesting project would be to list words in the Romanian language that have Slavic roots. I speak Slovak and Polish (and can fake my way through Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian) but when I was learning Romanian I was amazed to discover that I understood the words with Slavic roots (dragoste, slab, treaba, etc.) but had to look up most of the ones with Latin roots. Romanian also has words derived from Dacian, an ancient language that was extinct by the 4th C AD. Thank you for posting.

From my experience as a czech, slovakian and czech were not considered one language but they are *very* similar. Czech and Slovakian people can speak and understand each other without having to learn the other, no problemo. Many of our TRvidrs make colaborations with Slovakian TRvidrs and both of them speak their native language in the video and both sides understand them

For Czech, I would add that one unique feature is that the stress pretty much always lands on the first syllable. Another feature in standard Czech is the distinction between long and short vowels. Finally, I would say that it has six vowels, with a vowel quality distinction often between long and short i, with short i sounding more often like i in hit, rather than heat. Great video.

4:27 Vocative case in Russian is also present as a stylisation tool. Words put in this case, such as DRUZHE, BRATE or KAZACHE are used to refer to certain time in literature and cinema. Also some words in vocative case are used in certain sociolects. 4:32 Neo-vocative case in Russian are also used with pretty much any name, if one is long enough to be put in a case.

As a sidenote: #1 Czech isn't the only Slavic language to form past tense with participles. In fact it's a common mean to talk about the past in most of them, even though in some grammarian traditions they're referred to just as "past forms" (That's the case of Polish for example, in which the participle has fused with the present tense forms of the verb "to be" which obscures it's origins). #2 Continuing the past tense vein, I am not so sure if it's apprpriate to translate "snědl" as "eaten" since the former is an active participle and the former a passive one (the actual equivalent would be "sněden") #3 The arguments for analytic nature of Slovene also apply, either partially or fully, to all Western Slavic languages. #4 Also, again about Western Slavic languages - perfective verbs can be derived from the imperfective ones *and vice versa* in all of them, not just in Slovak (or Czech). I'm not super familiar with the other branches but I wouldn't be surprised if it applied to the East and South Slavic languages as well.

Great vid! I loved it and thanks to it I found out about a lot of tiny features I haven't heard of before. Greetings from Poland 😉

Im from Czechia, and i love learning things about other slavic languages. Also i love that lot of foreigners when they try to pronouns something in czech it sounds so weird. As its lot of time said that Czech is very hard language, i think the grammar is harder than the language itself

Respect to my bulgarian brothers 🇷🇴❤🇧🇬

Nice vid. Slovak has 4 basic noun inflectional paradigms for every gender and a lot of sub-paradigms and is a hell for foreigners to learn. Slovak, being in the center of the Slavic area, has features of all groups and a very high dialect diversity, with eastern Slovak being influenced by Polish and Rusyn, having stress on second-to-last syllable, and western-most Zahorie dialect being basically a form Moravian (which is another language you did not mention, since Moravian is seen as a dialect of Czech which you should not mention in Brno) and has highest mutual intelligibility with all Slavic languages. At least from the Slovak point of view. Another unmentioned Slavic language is Obodrite, which is extinct but attested and was spoken on the northwest baltic coast in present-day eastern Germany near borders with Denmark and was influenced by Germanic languages, as well as Ilmen Slavic, which was the language of Republic of Novgorod from the lake of Ilmen which is attested on ~8yo boy's school doodles and homeworks from 12 century (not kidding, search Onfim) and was assimilated by Muscovite Russian but could be perhaps considered an influence on Pomor dialect of Russian, the northernmost Slavic language spoken in Archangelsk and Murmansk. And of course the Goral langue which could be classified as a northern Slovak dialect but also as a south Polish dialect and not many people speak it today. Slavic languages are really one big linguistic continuum.

Silesian is in itself a group of dialects and it's pronounced /saɪˈliːʃiən/ with a penultimate syllable accent and three syllables altogether,. It's closer to Old Polish than the Polish that's spoken nowadays. You mentioned ą/ę as a feature and Silesian tends to get separated into 'om/em', there's a lot of cool vowel transformations and they change from city to city or even among the districts. Aside from the very obvious German influence, a lot of grammar and words are borrowed from Czech to the point that there are false friends homophones between Polish and Silesian, same as with Polish and Czech. Though there's currently no agreed upon orthography or alphabet as in recent years it's been used as a spoken, secondary language at home while Polish is taught at schools so it's been in decline and gained an unsophisticated reputation. Lately, there is a resurgence of it and shops and restaurants have started having menus in it, there's books translated to it and written in it and it's been turned into a point of regional pride (and merchandise).

As a native Russian speaker and bilingual Ukrainian speaker (I would even say Ukrainian and Rusyn), I have to admit that learning Slovak now would be much more difficult for me without knowing Ukrainian and Rusyn. Because many sounds that I naturally understand thanks to Ukrainian simply do not exist in Russian. And I want to add that the Slovak language sounds very nice to my ear, like something at the same time familiar, but with added spice haha :)

You should do a video on indo aryan languages. Kind of interesting how similar they all are IMO I say this because your video quality is absolutely amazing and I’d love to see the language family of the language that my parents speak be closely analyzed. I actually lied, make videos on whatever you want. But I will say that most indo aryan languages are mutually intelligible and there’s a lot of vocab borrowing from so many different languages.

Very informative. It would be interesting to make a followup video about the Interslavic Language. Or maybe talk about it in a presentation of constructed languages?

As someone born in Poland, I recently started to wonder: Why can't we have Interslavic 'language' lessons in school instead of German or Russian. Just think that someday, over 300 millions people would be able to understand each other by using something that's way much closer to their own language than that damn English (:P). It's so counterproductive that you have to learn one language at a time, to be able to communicate with someone from Vladivostok then with someone from Sofia. Just imagine how much closer we would become.

Im from poland and i know that people from other countries that learn polish struggle with pronoucing these letters:ę,ą,ń,ć,ś,ł,ż,ź apart from those ó is easy its like an u but used in certain words like Łódź , Dół, also i think niedźwiedź (bear) is hard to learners

This was a really incredible video. I really can't believe you managed to condense it into only 20 minutes! Скидам капу! 🙇‍♀

A pretty interesting video. As a native speaker of the Russian language, I find all the other Slavic languages quite interesting and fascinating. It is interesting to me that despite the fact that both Ukrainian and Belarusian are part of the same language branch as Russian, I find Ukrainian much easier to understand when it is both spoken and written. When it comes to Belarusian, the way it is written just scares me :D :D. I find it much easier to understand the spoken language than the written one. However, when I learn new words from both of these languages, I do not somehow treat or interpret them as separate languages as I do with English or Finnish, which feel foreign. Somehow the Slavic languages that are closer to Russian feel like"the same" language to me, but I never confuse them with Russian, more like an extension of the language if that makes sense. With the Slavic languages outside of the East Slavic group, I find the Slovenian language to be fascinating and beautiful. Like some of the cool features that it has grammar-wise. The Bulgarian language is a funny one for me... I have a bunch of Bulgarian friends and sometimes when I am tired and reading their exchange in Bulgarian, I get stuck of why I am reading words that look Russian, but not fully understanding the context until the realisation kicks in that I am reading in Bulgarian :D. Overall, I find the Slavic languages really interesting and it is always so much fun to learn what similarities and differences exist between Russian and all the other Slavic languages. Thank you for the video!

OH MY FELLOW!! This video REALLY WAS SOMETHING!! You really tried to do many of the sounds here. That was impressive! And the editing to put an audio of some of the sounds was so fluid!! And this is just a silly thought, but I couldn't keep myself from pausing the video everytime I wanted to see a bit more of detail in each new screen. GREAT VIDEO!!!

It's so cool that similar family languages all sound kinda similar. I'm russian and when my family was travelling through Ukraine we talked to people a lot. The best part is thet we spoke russian and they spoke ukranian and we all could understand each other perfectly.

Thank you for the video, it's a good overview, I discovered some interesting stuff for myself 👍 Evidentiality in Bulgarian was a big surprise to me. 00:36 Palatalized doesn't mean having "y" sound. Palatalized consonants are pronounced with the tongue slightly raised towards the palate. You say p, t, k, l but your tongue is raised just as for "y", you _don't_ add "y" after the palatalized consonant. "Y" in writing (or superscript ʲ in transcription) is just a graphic indicator of palatalization. 01:08 ALL Slavic languages have ti/vi distinction. It's English that doesn't have it, which makes it unique. The Russian vocative can also be used with almost any personal name ending with a vowel (usually unstressed): Dima - Dim, Sasha - Sash, Roza - Roz, Vanya - Van’, Karina - Karin, Marina - Marin, Misha - Mish, Albina - Albin. However, this is not standard Russian, you can but don't have to use the vocative in informal speech only.

Wow you made a really good work! You even mentioned Rusyn, Silesian, Kashubian, Sorbian and Old Church Slavonic - WOW :D I am czech and I have to correct few things: 11:19 - vskétat should be vzkvétat czech has one diphtong in its alphabet and it is CH ... more slavic languages has this unique sound but I haven`t seen it nor in the general traits neither in czech diphtongs. But again - you made really good job, most of the people wouldn`t even consider speaking about Rusyn or Sorbian or Old Church Slavonic. Fun fact - did you know that you can download old church slavonic keyboard to your phone? 🤪

As a czech i found a old lady in Slovakia she was speaking rusyn and i understood everything rusyn is pretty straightforward for a czech or slovak or at least for me😂

As a native Bulgarian speaker it looks the least scary to me :D I also like to find parallels with English very often (makes it very easy). In a strange way there are a lot, but sometimes "in reverse", if this makes any sense :D

10:30 You made a mistake, Czechia has been landlocked until 2022 with Královec

As a Bulgarian, I am incredibly impressed by this video. What an effort!

You have managed to include an enormous amount of information in a single clip here. I appreciate it is a lot of work as well. Still the tempo is too fast for me. I think you should perhaps make separate videos for each language or include only global info.

Just to clarify: Czech and Slovak were indeed considered 2 forms of "Czechoslovak" language between 1920 and 1948, but they were always very distinct, _different forms_ (or different languages). Czechoslovak language is just a legal term; there isn't and wasn't such an actual language. While mutually intelligible, you do need a bit of getting used to one another. I was born in Czechoslovakia in late '70s, I am Czech and I was very used to hearing Slovak. Thus, I have no problem to understand Slovak or even speak it. But my children, who didn't hear it on daily basis, did have trouble understanding it when we went to a hike in Slovakia and they only later got accustomed to it by listening to Slovak TRvidrs.

3:08 "Speakers of one language can often get a gist of a conversation spoken in another language." Czech/Slovak speaker here. In case of Polish, what we get is the full conversation plus something extra.

10:10 In history class, i learned a lot of Poles (especially from the regions where they speak silesian) went to Texas, to work in the oil industry. some important ways to refine oil were invented in Poland, which caused many people to move to Texas and start working there. at that time Poland also was experimenting with oil, tho i dont precisely remember the details. so basically, very high work opportunities caused many workers to move to Texas

I don't know why, but I just become so happy every time slavic languages get attention and their time to shine! I'm russian myself, I don't have any problem understanding ukrainian most of the time, little less I understand belorusian. The next i'd say would be serbo-croatian, but all the others sound unfamiliar, especially czech. Czech sounds so beautiful, I'd say it's the prettiest slavic language, but I can't understand a word they say

Really great video. It's funny to see someone explaining your own language :) But you didn't mentioned that in czech we have 2 or 3 forms of every noun. We use them when we want to say that somethink is small, big or cute for example house. This word have 3 forms: If it's normal house we say: dům If we want to say that it's big house we say: barák And if we want to say that that house is small we say: domeček Or cat. This word have 2 forms: Normal cat is: kočka And cute cat is: kočička Really confusing isn't it?

One of the more interesting things about Central South Slavic (what is called Serbocroatian) is that it displays different areal features within the continuum. For example, the deeper southeast you go the less people use verbal infinitives, lack of infinitives is a Balkan sprachbund feature.

I support your channel. I really appreciate your sharing your info with us about linguistics. :D