Posted Wednesday, April 9, 2025
1y
INTP
Cancer
7Nerd alternative history linguistics thought
So, as a Slav, a Pole, I am able to understand West Slavic languages to a decent degree. Czech and Slovak sound outright funny to a Polish person, with no offence to our friends from the south. I am also able to understand East Slavic languages, even Russian, without learning it, while Belarusian and Ukrainian seem to be much closer lexically to the Polish language than Russian. However, I am unable to understand South Slavic languages, almost not at all. Like, I see Slavs had something to do with them and certain words look/sound familiar, but generally, I cannot understand more than two full sentences in a row. As anyone can see on this map, all Slavic linguistic subfamilies were geographically connected with each other in the past. There had to be a cultural and linguistic exchange. However, South Slavs were disconnected from the rest by Hungarians and Germans (Later Austrians). My theory might sound kind of trivial, but their geographic isolation caused them to drift further from the rest. The nerdish thought is an unanswerable question - What would have the entirety of the Slavic languages looked like in 2025 if South Slavic languages were never geographically disconnected? It is impossible to answer, I think, but it's fun to think about the possibilities sometimes. ;)
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Maru
1y
INFJ
Virgo
7Great question! Can't answer directly, as I don't know enough about the regional history and languages but you might be able to get some kind of clue by looking at other language families. Namely Romance languages, the Arabic family of languages or Germanic languages. It is very interesting to see how geography, history and politics have shaped individual languages and language families.
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