Identifying Slavic languages

[alice]

For those of you who can identify a particular Slavic language when hearing someone speaking it, what do you listen out for?

[hwhatting]

Russian: The vowel reductions, they're a dead giveaway. Only if it also has afficates for palatalised /t/, /d/, then it's Belarussian. (Basically, Belarussian is the only Slavic language you can mistake for Russian if you only hear some snippets)
Polish: Again the afficates for /t/, /d/, plus /w/ for the "hard l" (allthough the latter isn't there in some regional pronounciations).
For Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian I go for a combination of (1) noticing that they're not Russian or Polish, (2) spech rhythm and (3) key words.
Concenring the other ones, I have not much experience in identifying them from listening.

[Moose-tache]

If someone is speaking Italian to you, except you gradually realize that you speak Italian and still can't understand a word of it: Croatian
If someone is doing a highly offensive parody of a Slavic language, who has never heard one spoken in real life, except it's real: Polish

[gestaltist]

Russian: The vowel reductions, they're a dead giveaway. Only if it also has afficates for palatalised /t/, /d/, then it's Belarussian. (Basically, Belarussian is the only Slavic language you can mistake for Russian if you only hear some snippets)
Polish: Again the afficates for /t/, /d/, plus /w/ for the "hard l" (allthough the latter isn't there in some regional pronounciations).
For Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian I go for a combination of (1) noticing that they're not Russian or Polish, (2) spech rhythm and (3) key words.
Concenring the other ones, I have not much experience in identifying them from listening.

A few comments: vowel reductions are also a thing in Ukrainian, and it can easily be mistaken for Russian. The give-away here is a different distribution of the high vowels than in Russian.

Secondly, it's a completely different story depending on whether you know a slavic language already (and can look for patterns) or not and are only going by the general feel.

[hwhatting]

A few comments: vowel reductions are also a thing in Ukrainian, and it can easily be mistaken for Russian. The give-away here is a different distribution of the high vowels than in Russian.

Well, in the last couple of weeks I had lots of opportunities to hear Ukraininan in the media, and I find it easy to distinguish from Standard Russian; I find the difference between stressed and unstresed vowels is much weaker than in (Standard) Russian or Belarussioan. What is harder to distinguish from Ukrainian is Ukrainian-accented Russian, but that's only to be expected.
A non-Slavic langage that sometimes sounds surprisingly like Russian if you only hear the prosody and cannot make out individual words is European Portuguese.

[Linguoboy]

For those of you who can identify a particular Slavic language when hearing someone speaking it, what do you listen out for?

Here in Chicago, the most common Slavic languages are Polish, BCS, and Russian (in roughly that order) and they're relatively easy to distinguish. As Hans-Werner says, Polish is chock-full of shibilants and Russian has got extensive vowel reduction, so if the language has neither, it's probably BCS.

For Czech and Slovak, the unstressed long vowels are distinctive. Baltic languages have them too and are somewhat similar in structure, but their /s/ masculine nominative endings are pretty salient (apart from the differences in vocab). Moreover, in Chicago, it's more common to hear Latvian or Lithuanians than Czech or Slovak anyhow.

I hear a fair bit of Bulgarian, too--the neighbours are Bulgarian, as well as one of my coworkers--and it's hard to say exactly what distinguishes it. I guess if it sounds like BCS but you've got a lot of dental suffixes (on account of the suffixed definite article)?

[Travis B.]

For those of you who can identify a particular Slavic language when hearing someone speaking it, what do you listen out for?

Here in Chicago, the most common Slavic languages are Polish, BCS, and Russian (in roughly that order) and they're relatively easy to distinguish. As Hans-Werner says, Polish is chock-full of shibilants and Russian has got extensive vowel reduction, so if the language has neither, it's probably BCS.

Doesn't Serbo-Croatian have its whole pitch accent thing?

[Linguoboy]

Doesn't Serbo-Croatian have its whole pitch accent thing?

It does but I'm not really attuned to it.

(I also tend to default to vocabulary anyway since I have, at one time or another, tried to teach myself almost all these languages. I got furthest in Polish but I've forgotten most of what I learned.)

[malloc]

People still speak Polish in Chicago as an everyday language? I always assumed they switched to English over the past hundred years of living here like most of the other European immigrant groups.

[Linguoboy]

People still speak Polish in Chicago as an everyday language? I always assumed they switched to English over the past hundred years of living here like most of the other European immigrant groups.

LOL. Polish immigrants are still coming to Chicago. Not in the numbers they did in the immediate postwar period (which was a while ago but still not “a hundred years”) but significant enough to preserve an active Polish-speaking community—one significantly bolstered by a wave of post-Cold War immigration.

Polish immigration to the United States experienced a small wave in the years following 1989. Specifically, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent fall of Soviet control freed emigration from Poland. A pent-up demand of Poles who previously were not allowed to emigrate was satisfied, and many left for Germany or America. The United States Immigration Act of 1990 admitted immigrants from 34 countries adversely affected by a previous piece of immigration legislation; in 1992, when the Act was implemented, over a third of Polish immigrants were approved under this measure. The most popular destination for Polish immigrants following 1989 was Chicago, followed by New York City. This was the oldest cohort of immigrants from Poland, averaging 29.3 years in 1992.

[Travis B.]

People still speak Polish in Chicago as an everyday language? I always assumed they switched to English over the past hundred years of living here like most of the other European immigrant groups.

LOL. Polish immigrants are still coming to Chicago. Not in the numbers they did in the immediate postwar period (which was a while ago but still not “a hundred years”) but significant enough to preserve an active Polish-speaking community—one significantly bolstered by a wave of post-Cold War immigration.

Polish immigration to the United States experienced a small wave in the years following 1989. Specifically, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent fall of Soviet control freed emigration from Poland. A pent-up demand of Poles who previously were not allowed to emigrate was satisfied, and many left for Germany or America. The United States Immigration Act of 1990 admitted immigrants from 34 countries adversely affected by a previous piece of immigration legislation; in 1992, when the Act was implemented, over a third of Polish immigrants were approved under this measure. The most popular destination for Polish immigrants following 1989 was Chicago, followed by New York City. This was the oldest cohort of immigrants from Poland, averaging 29.3 years in 1992.

My sister's landlords when she first moved to the Chicago area were Polish-speaking.

[malloc]

LOL. Polish immigrants are still coming to Chicago. Not in the numbers they did in the immediate postwar period (which was a while ago but still not “a hundred years”) but significant enough to preserve an active Polish-speaking community—one significantly bolstered by a wave of post-Cold War immigration.

Well ok then. I always had the impression that immigration from Europe trailed off in the early 20th century. My great grandmother was the daughter of Polish immigrants and born in Chicago around a hundred years ago. I only met her once or twice in my early childhood and have no idea whether she spoke Polish though.

[Travis B.]

LOL. Polish immigrants are still coming to Chicago. Not in the numbers they did in the immediate postwar period (which was a while ago but still not “a hundred years”) but significant enough to preserve an active Polish-speaking community—one significantly bolstered by a wave of post-Cold War immigration.

Well ok then. I always had the impression that immigration from Europe trailed off in the early 20th century. My great grandmother was the daughter of Polish immigrants and born in Chicago around a hundred years ago. I only met her once or twice in my early childhood and have no idea whether she spoke Polish though.

My maternal grandmother was from Chicago and grew up Polish-speaking; she even went to school in Polish. Sadly, though, as an adult she forgot her Polish altogether.

[hwhatting]

I hear a fair bit of Bulgarian, too--the neighbours are Bulgarian, as well as one of my coworkers--and it's hard to say exactly what distinguishes it. I guess if it sounds like BCS but you've got a lot of dental suffixes (on account of the suffixed definite article)?

The Bulgarian I heard (two weeks in Sofia) had a disctinctive prosody - impressionistically somewhat like an engine or a machine gun, tatata - tatata -tatata

[Sol717]

Doesn't Serbo-Croatian have its whole pitch accent thing?

It does but I'm not really attuned to it.

Your inability to notice it may be because it doesn't exist in some of the Serbo-Croatian that you listen to; standard S-C spoken in Croatia can sometimes have a stress accent due to the influence of Kajkavian dialects on the Shtokavian/Štokavian standard language; though this isn't reflected in official linguistic norms. Even varieties with such a system don't necessarily conform to the prescriptions; varieties of standard S-C with two or three accents are attested (according to this paper, this is a compromise between the quadraccentual norm and the uniaccentual reality of Kajkavian-influenced speech, but it's worth noting that some Chakavian dialects apparently have bi- or triaccentual pitch systems).