Do you have a tip for telling languages apart when they the cyrillic alphabet? Like, how can i look at a written sentence and say where it's from? It's still very new to me ^^
Yes! This is an awesome question and I’m super stoked someone asked this. I assume this is reference to this post that I made?
So to start out, there are only a few languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet – lots of Slavic languages use the Latin alphabet now.
For this post, I’m going to use Russian as the baseline and explain how to tell specifically when it is NOT Russian, as that was what the meme was about.
The easiest way to spot Belarusian is the letter “ў.”
The simplest way to tell if something is Ukrainian are the letters “I” and “Ï.” Ukrainian also has the letter “Ґ” (a Г with a tail at the top), but so does Rusyn so you can’t be 100% certain.
This brings us to Rusyn, the fourth East Slavic language. As mentioned above, it, in addition to Ukrainian, has the letter “Ґ.” Beyond that, I don’t have any quick-and-dirty tips for being 100% sure the language is Rusyn.
Serbian has the letters “J,” “Ђ,” “Љ,” “Њ,” “Ћ,” and “Џ.” Note that, assuming you do not see the letters “С́” or “З́,” you may be reading Montenegrin, as it shares these letters with Serbian. Also note that “Љ,” “Њ,” and “J” are found in Macedonian.
Montenegrin can be difficult to discern from Serbian, but if you see the letters “С́” or “З́,” you’re reading Montenegrin.
Macedonian can be spotted by the letters “Ѓ,” “Ќ,” and “S.”
Last, but certainly not least, is Bulgarian. If you do not speak Russian, this one will be the hardest to point out. This is because the orthographies are incredibly similar. However, if you are a Russian speaker (even at a fairly low level) it becomes much easier because you can tell quite quickly that it doesn’t sound/seem/flow like Russian.
Other languages, including Kurdish and Tajik, often use the Cyrillic alphabet. However, for the purposes of this post, I have limited the explanations to Slavic languages, as that was what the original meme was about.
I sincerely hope this helps!
