Abstract:

Slavic languages are spoken by significant number of European inhabitants. On the other hand, accounting is a business language which is spoken by every businessman in the world. Every serious business decision is made based on accounting information. English language has become truly leader in business world, especially with the development of the International Financial Reporting Standards which are applied by more than 150 countries. Other than that, many national accounting standards converge with the IFRS. As a consequence, English vocabulary used in the IFRS has a great influence on domestic accounting terminology. National regulations and literature go hand in hand with the globalisation processes and play inevitable role in every part of our lives. The vocabulary of a certain country depends on many features, among others, historical, geographical, national, political, and others. Many linguistic analyses imply that there is a similar nature among Slavic languages but these analyses usually didn’t involve specific professional vocabulary. Considering such facts, the goal of the paper is to examine the level of similarities and differences between the selected professional languages from the Slavic language family in the field of basic accounting terminology. Further, authors test the level of languages' intelligibility among the neighbouring countries. For the purpose of the study, following Slavic languages are selected: Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Check, Polish and Russian. The research methodology includes theoretical analysis of main linguistic opinion regarding similarities between the selected languages; word translation method which includes the selection and translation of certain accounting terms. Based on that, the comparative analysis of accounting terminology’s correspondence and divergence will be performed. Besides, authors will explore the linkage between the most similar languages.