Ukrainian language

Theories Specific developments that led to a gradual change of the Old East Slavic vowel system into the system found in modern Ukrainian began around the 12th/13th century (that is, still at the time of the Kievan Rus) with a lengthening and raising of the Old East Slavic mid vowels e and o when followed by a consonant and a weak yer vowel that would eventually disappear completely, for example Old East Slavic котъ /kɔtə/ > Ukrainian кіт /kit/ 'cat' (via transitional stages such as /koˑtə̆/, /kuˑt(ə̆)/, /kyˑt/ or similar) or Old East Slavic печь /pʲɛtʃʲə/ > Ukrainian піч /pitʃ/ 'oven' (via transitional stages such as /pʲeˑtʃʲə̆/, /pʲiˑtʃʲ/ or similar). This raising and other phonological developments of the time, such as the merger of the Old East Slavic vowel phonemes и /i/ and ы /ɨ/ into the specifically Ukrainian phoneme /ɪ ~ e/, spelled with и (in the 13th/14th centuries), and the fricativisation of the Old East Slavic consonant г /g/, probably first to /ɣ/ (in the 13th century), with /ɦ/ as a reflex in Modern Ukrainian, did not happen in Russian. Only the fricativisation of Old East Slavic г /g/ occurred in Belarusian, where the present-day reflex is /ɣ/. Ahatanhel Krymsky and Aleksey Shakhmatov assumed the existence of the common spoken language of Eastern Slavs only in prehistoric times. According to them the diversification of the Old East Slavic language took place in the 8th or early 9th century. Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak stated that the Old Novgorod dialect differed significantly from that of other dialects of Kievan Rus during the 11th–12th century, but started becoming more similar to them around the 13th–15th centuries. The modern Russian language hence developed from the fusion of this Novgorod dialect and the common dialect spoken by the other Kievan Rus, whereas the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian languages developed from dialects which did not differ from each other in a significant way. Ukrainian linguist Stepan Smal-Stotsky denies the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. Similar points of view were shared by Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo, Ivan Ohienko and others. According to this theory, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages during the 6th through 9th centuries. The Ukrainian language was formed by convergence of tribal dialects, mostly due to an intensive migration of the population within the territory of today's Ukraine in later historical periods. This point of view was also supported by George Shevelov's phonological studies, which argue that specific features were already recognizable in the southern dialects of Old East Slavic (seen as ancestors to Ukrainian) as far back as these varieties can be documented. During the 13th century, when German settlers were invited to Ukraine by the princes of the Kingdom of Ruthenia, German words began to appear in the language spoken in Ukraine. Their influence would continue under Poland not only through German colonists but also through the Yiddish-speaking Jews. Often such words involve trade or handicrafts. Examples of words of German or Yiddish origin spoken in Ukraine include ("roof"), ("pipe"), ("market"), ("furrier"), and ("master" or "craftsman"). Developments under Poland and Lithuania In the 13th century, eastern parts of Rus (including Moscow) came under Tatar rule until their unification under the Tsardom of Muscovy, whereas the south-western areas (including Kyiv) were incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. For the following four centuries, the languages of the two regions evolved in relative isolation from each other. Direct written evidence of the existence of the Ukrainian language dates to the late 16th century. By the 16th century, a peculiar official language formed: a mixture of the liturgical standardised language of Old Church Slavonic, Ruthenian and Polish. The influence of the latter gradually increased relative to the former two, as the nobility and rural large-landowning class, known as the szlachta, was largely Polish-speaking. Documents soon took on many Polish characteristics superimposed on Ruthenian phonetics. Polish–Lithuanian rule and education also involved significant exposure to Latin. Much of the influence of Poland on the development of the Ukrainian language has been attributed to this period, and is reflected in multiple words and constructions used in everyday Ukrainian speech that were taken from Polish or Latin. Examples of Polish words adopted from this period include zavzhdy (always; taken from old Polish word zawżdy) and obitsiaty (to promise; taken from Polish obiecać) and from Latin (via Polish) raptom (suddenly) and meta (aim or goal). By the mid-17th century, the linguistic divergence between the Ukrainian and Russian languages had become so significant that there was a need for translators during negotiations for the Treaty of Pereyaslav, between Bohdan Khmelnytsky, head of the Zaporozhian Host, and the Russian state. By the 18th century, Ruthenian had diverged into regional variants, developing into the modern Belarusian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian languages. Chronology The accepted chronology of Ukrainian divides the language into Old Ukrainian, Middle Ukrainian, and Modern Ukrainian. Shevelov explains that much of this is based on the character of contemporary written sources, ultimately reflecting socio-historical developments, and he further subdivides the Middle period into three phases: • Proto-Ukrainian (abbreviated PU, Ukrainian: , until the mid-11th century), with no extant written sources by speakers in Ukraine. Corresponding to aspects of Old East Slavic. • Old Ukrainian (OU, or , mid-11th to 14th c., conventional end date 1387), elements of phonology are deduced from written texts mainly in Church Slavic. Part of broader Old East Slavic. • Middle Ukrainian ( or , 15th to 18th c.), historically called Ruthenian. • Early Middle Ukrainian (EMU, , 15th to mid-16th c., 1387–1575), analysis focuses on distinguishing Ukrainian and Belarusian texts. • Middle Ukrainian (MU, , mid-16th to early 18th c., 1575–1720), represented by several vernacular language varieties as well as a version of Church Slavonic. • Late Middle Ukrainian (LMU, , rest of the 18th c., 1720–1818), found in many mixed Ukrainian–Russian and Russian–Ukrainian texts. • Modern Ukrainian (MoU, from the very end of the 18th c., or , from 1818), the vernacular recognized first in literature, and subsequently all other written genres. Ukraine marks the Day of Ukrainian Writing and Language on 9 November, the Eastern Orthodox feast day of Nestor the Chronicler. ==History of the spoken language==

, 1646 Rus and Kingdom of Ruthenia The era of Kievan Rus ( 880–1240) is the subject of some linguistic controversy, as the language of much of the literature was purely or heavily Old Church Slavonic. Some theorists see an early Ukrainian stage in language development here, calling it Old Ruthenian; others term this era Old East Slavic. Russian theorists tend to amalgamate Rus to the modern nation of Russia, and call this linguistic era Old Russian. However, according to Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak (2012), people from the Novgorod Republic did not call themselves Rus until the 14th century; earlier Novgorodians reserved the term Rus for the Kiev, Pereyaslavl and Chernigov principalities. Many Ukrainian nobles learned the Polish language and converted to Catholicism during that period in order to maintain their lofty aristocratic position. Polish has had heavy influences on Ukrainian, particularly in Western Ukraine. The southwestern Ukrainian dialects are transitional to Polish. As the Ukrainian language developed further, some borrowings from Tatar and Turkish occurred. Other languages which influenced Ukrainian speech during that time were Latin and Greek. Ukrainians found themselves in a colonial situation. The Russian centre adopted the name Little Russia for Ukraine and Little Russian for the language, an expression that originated in Byzantine Greek and may originally have meant "old, original, fundamental Russia", and had been in use since the 14th century. Ukrainian high culture went into a long period of steady decline. The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was taken over by the Russian Empire. Most of the remaining Ukrainian schools also switched to Polish or Russian in the territories controlled by these respective countries, which was followed by a new wave of Polonization and Russification of the native nobility. Gradually the official language of Ukrainian provinces under Poland was changed to Polish, while the upper classes in the Russian part of Ukraine used Russian. In Austrian Galicia and Lodomeria (1772–1918) After the 1772 First Partition of Poland, when the lands annexed by the Austrian Habsburg monarchy were reorganised as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, the Habsburg administration was initially surprised to find out that, apart from Poles, there were a lot of other people living in it whom they began calling Ruthenen ("Ruthenians" or "Rusyny"). They differed from the Poles in that the vast majority of them adhered to the Greek Catholic faith (organised as the Ruthenian Uniate Church) rather than Roman Catholic, and that their liturgical language was Church Slavonic rather than Latin. Most of them had not received much education; they used Ruthenian only as a spoken language, few could read or write, and those who did more often used Polish or (increasingly) German instead. As Empress Maria Theresa had introduced a general compulsory education (Allgemeiner Schulzwang) in 1774, and enacted it in newly-acquired Galicia and Lodomeria in 1777, the decision was made to produce Polish and Ruthenian textbooks that were used in elementary schools for those language communities. Although some Ruthenian parish schools were established in some villages, and some printed primers and catechisms in Ruthenian were distributed there, the effects of Ruthenian-language education achieved very little until 1815. That year, , a Przemyśl eparchy canon who contributed to the establishment of a strong network of Ruthenian parish schools and a teacher training school, published a catechism at the Royal University of Buda entitled Christian Learning in the Case of the Common Catechism for Parish Children. He followed this up in 1823 by a Grammar of the Slovene–Ruthenian language (never published), and in 1829 by his treatise Information on the Ruthenian Language (published both in Polish as Rozprawa o ięzyku ruskim and in Ruthenian as "Відомість о руском языці"), which represents the first scholarly study arguing that Ruthenian was a language in its own right, separate from Polish, Russian, and Church Slavonic. On the other hand, new educational regulations in 1818 determined that schools that were exclusively attended by children of Greek Catholic parents were to receive instruction in Ruthenian, whereas schools attended by children of both Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic parents had Polish as the medium of instruction. Nevertheless, pupils at Ruthenian-instruction schools had to learn Polish as a second language as well. In higher education, Ruthenian was not valued as an equal language, and students were expected to learn and use Latin and Polish instead. Students training to become Greek Catholic priests at the University of Lviv did receive instruction in Ruthenian in the so-called "Studium ruthenum" according to Austrian regulations between 1787 and 1809, but it was not a fully-fledged course; instead, it was regarded as a temporary measure for students who did not yet know Latin. Both its professors and alumni received only half the salary of their counterparts from the "Studium latinum", the number of students steadily decreased over the decades, and in 1809 the Ruthenians themselves requested the "Studium ruthenum" to be abandoned. In the first few decades of the Austrian period in Galicia, there was also confusion amongst both the Habsburg administration and educated Ruthenians about which variety of written Ruthenian to use: late Church Slavonic, literary Russian, traditional written Ruthenian, or something close to how Ruthenian was actually spoken in Galicia at that time. The Habsburg Imperial censor for Slavic publications, Jernej Kopitar (himself from Slovenia), encouraged Ruthenian authors to base their written language on the Ruthenian vernacular, and from December 1833 onwards, to write Ruthenian in a Latin alphabet rather than Cyrillic. This initiated a discussion on Ruthenian identity, later called the "First Alphabet War" or "Blizzard". Although most Ruthenian intellectuals did respond by increasingly basing their writings on spoken Ruthenian, the majority of them defended the use Cyrillic over concerns of Polonisation. Nevertheless, they could not agree on various standardisation issues; three different Ruthenian grammars were published between 1834 and 1848, and none of them was widely adopted. Before 1848, no Ruthenian dictionaries were produced, no Ruthenian-language periodical press existed within Habsburg Galicia, and Ruthenian played no role as language of administration. The Revolutions of 1848 in the Austrian Empire changed everything: the native languages of most populations in the Empire, including Ruthenian, were accorded official status, and all laws in the Danubian monarchy would be published in these languages from 1 October 1849 onwards. Ruthenian would henceforth be used in local administration in the Landesgesetzblätter. From 1849 onwards, various official periodicals were established in Ruthenian, and the Interior Ministry stipulated in July 1849 that street signs in Lviv had to include Ruthenian versions. In October 1852, the Ministry of Justice also decreed that Ruthenian could be used by parties involved in legal issues in their communication with the courts of law, although it would take until 1861 to allow these letters to employ skoropys Cyrillic rather than Latin script (or the Muscovite graždanka variety of Cyrillic). In the post-1848 era, there were some contradictory developments, some of which countered Polonisation in the sphere of education, while others stimulated further Polonisation in the sphere of administration. Similarly, Galician Russophilia or Moscophilia strived towards ever greater assimilation of Ruthenian towards the so-called "Great Russian" language as used in Moscow, which still heavily leaned on Church Slavonic. Both the Habsburg administration and Greek Catholic Church raised concerns that these were "barely comprehensible" to the common people of Galicia and hampered the "development of the Ruthenian language", adding that Orthodox Imperial Russia was a threat to the overwhelmingly Catholic Habsburg realm. Matters once again came to a head in May 1859, when the Polish governor of Galicia Gołuchowski recommended Czech linguist Josef Jireček's proposal for a Ruthenian Latin alphabet, leading to the "Second Alphabet War" or "Blizzard". Ruthenian intellectuals almost unanimously rejected the proposal for fear of Polonisation, leading the government to overreact by banning the "Russian script" (meaning the Muscovite graždanka) in July 1859, which Ruthenian writers generally ignored. By March 1861, the Habsburg State Ministry essentially conceded defeat by stating that the Ruthenians themselves were responsible for developing their own language, and that it was not up to the government. Around the same time, however, Ruthenian intellectuals became acquainted with the writings of Ukrainian intellectuals from "Little Russia" in the Russian Empire, such as poet Taras Shevchenko (died 1861), who was fiercely anti-Russian and Ukrainophile, leading many Galician Ruthenians to abandon their earlier Russophilia. In between the pro-Polish and pro-Russian tendencies, the Ruthenian language in Galicia would gradually develop into an independent literary and intellectual written language in the second half of the 19th century, when it was increasingly called "Ukrainian". In the Russian Empire During the 19th century, a revival of Ukrainian self-identification manifested in the literary classes of both Russian-Empire Dnieper Ukraine and Austrian Galicia. The Brotherhood of Sts Cyril and Methodius in Kyiv applied an old word for the Cossack motherland, Ukrajina, as a self-appellation for the nation of Ukrainians, and Ukrajinska mova for the language. Many writers published works in the Romantic tradition of Europe demonstrating that Ukrainian was not merely a language of the village but suitable for literary pursuits. However, in the Russian Empire expressions of Ukrainian culture and especially language were repeatedly persecuted for fear that a self-aware Ukrainian nation would threaten the unity of the empire. In 1804 Ukrainian as a subject and language of instruction was banned from schools. In 1847 the Brotherhood of St Cyril and Methodius was terminated. The same year Taras Shevchenko was arrested, exiled for ten years, and banned for political reasons from writing and painting. In 1862 Pavlo Chubynsky was exiled for seven years to Arkhangelsk. The Ukrainian magazine Osnova was discontinued. In 1863, the tsarist interior minister Pyotr Valuyev proclaimed in his decree that "there never has been, is not, and never can be a separate Little Russian language". Although the name of Ukraine is known since 1187, it was not applied to the language until the mid-19th century. The linguonym Ukrainian language appears in Yakiv Holovatsky's book from 1849, listed there as a variant name of the Little Russian language. In a private letter from 1854, Taras Shevchenko lauds "our splendid Ukrainian language". Valuyev's decree from 1863 derides the "Little Russian" language throughout, but also mentions "the so-called Ukrainian language" once. A following ban on Ukrainian books led to Alexander II's secret Ems Ukaz, which prohibited publication and importation of most Ukrainian-language books, public performances and lectures, and even banned the printing of Ukrainian texts accompanying musical scores. A period of leniency after 1905 was followed by another strict ban in 1914, which also affected Russian-occupied Galicia. For much of the 19th century the Austrian authorities demonstrated some preference for Polish culture, but the Ukrainians were relatively free to partake in their own cultural pursuits in Halychyna and Bukovina, where Ukrainian was widely used in education and official documents. The suppression by Russia hampered the literary development of the Ukrainian language in Dnipro Ukraine, but there was a constant exchange with Halychyna, and many works were published under Austria and smuggled to the east. By the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of Austro-Hungary in 1918, Ukrainians were ready to openly develop a body of national literature, institute a Ukrainian-language educational system, and form an independent state (the Ukrainian People's Republic, shortly joined by the West Ukrainian People's Republic). During this brief independent statehood the stature and use of Ukrainian greatly improved. The following table shows the distribution of settlement by native language ("по родному языку") in 1897 in Russian Empire governorates (guberniyas) that had more than 100,000 Ukrainian speakers. Although in the rural regions of the Ukrainian provinces, 80% of the inhabitants said that Ukrainian was their native language in the Census of 1897 (for which the results are given above), in the urban regions only 32.5% of the population claimed Ukrainian as their native language. For example, in Odesa (then part of the Russian Empire), at the time the largest city in the territory of current Ukraine, only 5.6% of the population said Ukrainian was their native language. Until the 1920s the urban population in Ukraine grew faster than the number of Ukrainian speakers. This implies that there was a (relative) decline in the use of Ukrainian language. For example, in Kyiv, the number of people stating that Ukrainian was their native language declined from 30.3% in 1874 to 16.6% in 1917. However, practice was often a different story: Still it was implicitly understood in the hopes of minority nations that Ukrainian would be used in the Ukrainian SSR, Uzbek would be used in the Uzbek SSR, and so on. However, Russian was used as the lingua franca in all parts of the Soviet Union and a special term, "a language of inter-ethnic communication", was coined to denote its status. Stalin Khrushchev thaw were listed in the languages of all fifteen Soviet republics. On this 1961 1 Rbl note, the Ukrainian for "one rouble", один карбованець (odyn karbovanets), directly follows the Russian один рубль (odin rubl). After the death of Stalin (1953), a general policy of relaxing the language policies of the past was implemented (1958 to 1963). The Khrushchev era which followed saw a policy of relatively lenient concessions to development of the languages at the local and republic level, though its results in Ukraine did not go nearly as far as those of the Soviet policy of Ukrainianization in the 1920s. Journals and encyclopedic publications advanced in the Ukrainian language during the Khrushchev era, as well as transfer of Crimea under Ukrainian SSR jurisdiction. Yet, the 1958 school reform that allowed parents to choose the language of primary instruction for their children, unpopular among the circles of the national intelligentsia in parts of the USSR, meant that non-Russian languages would slowly give way to Russian in light of the pressures of survival and advancement. The gains of the past, already largely reversed by the Stalin era, were offset by the liberal attitude towards the requirement to study the local languages (the requirement to study Russian remained). Parents were usually free to choose the language of study of their children (except in few areas where attending the Ukrainian school might have required a long daily commute) and they often chose Russian, which reinforced the resulting Russification. In this sense, some analysts argue that it was not the "oppression" or "persecution", but rather the lack of protection against the expansion of Russian language that contributed to the relative decline of Ukrainian in the 1970s and 1980s. According to this view, it was inevitable that successful careers required a good command of Russian, while knowledge of Ukrainian was not vital, so it was common for Ukrainian parents to send their children to Russian-language schools, even though Ukrainian-language schools were usually available. The number of students in Russian-language in Ukraine schools was constantly increasing, from 14 percent in 1939 to more than 30 percent in 1962. Shelest period The Communist Party leader from 1963 to 1972, Petro Shelest, pursued a policy of defending Ukraine's interests within the Soviet Union against chauvinism. While he rejected Ukrainian nationalism, Shelest strongly promoted the use of the Ukrainian language and developed plans to expand the role of Ukrainian in higher education. He was removed, however, after only a brief tenure, for being too lenient on Ukrainian nationalism. While Shcherbytsky still "defended the use of the Ukrainian language, promoted Ukraine’s particular interests, and defended certain aspects of Ukrainian culture, such as Shevchenko’s poetry", he also shifted towards speaking Russian instead of Ukrainian in official settings. Gorbachev and perebudova The management of dissent by the local Ukrainian Communist Party was more fierce and thorough than in other parts of the Soviet Union. As a result, at the start of the Mikhail Gorbachev reforms perebudova and hlasnist’ (Ukrainian for perestroika and glasnost), Ukraine under Shcherbytsky was slower to liberalize than Russia itself. Although Ukrainian still remained the native language for the majority in the nation on the eve of Ukrainian independence, a significant share of ethnic Ukrainians were russified. In Donetsk there were no Ukrainian language schools and in Kyiv only a quarter of children went to Ukrainian language schools. The Russian language was the dominant vehicle, not just of government function, but of the media, commerce, and modernity itself. This was substantially less the case for western Ukraine, which escaped the artificial famine, Great Purge, and most of Stalinism. And this region became the center of a hearty, if only partial, renaissance of the Ukrainian language during independence. Independence in the modern era are in Ukrainian. The evolution in their language followed the changes in the language policies in post-war Ukraine. Originally, all signs and voice announcements in the metro were in Ukrainian, but their language was changed to Russian in the early 1980s, at the height of Shcherbytsky's gradual Russification. In the perestroika liberalization of the late 1980s, the signs were changed to bilingual. This was accompanied by bilingual voice announcements in the trains. In the early 1990s, both signs and voice announcements were changed again from bilingual to Ukrainian-only during the de-russification campaign that followed Ukraine's independence. Since 2012 the signs have been in both Ukrainian and English. Since 1991, Ukrainian has been the official state language in Ukraine, and the state administration implemented government policies to broaden the use of Ukrainian. The educational system in Ukraine has been transformed over the first decade of independence from a system that is partly Ukrainian to one that is overwhelmingly so. The government has also mandated a progressively increased role for Ukrainian in the media and commerce. In the 2001 census, 67.5% of the country's population named Ukrainian as their native language (a 2.8% increase from 1989), while 29.6% named Russian (a 3.2% decrease). For many Ukrainians (of various ethnic origins), the term native language may not necessarily associate with the language they use more frequently. The overwhelming majority of ethnic Ukrainians consider the Ukrainian language native, including those who often speak Russian. In 2019, the law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" was approved by the parliament, formalizing rules governing the usage of the language and introducing penalties for violations. ==Literature and literary language==

The literary Ukrainian language, which was preceded by Old East Slavic literature, may be subdivided into two stages: during the 12th to 18th centuries what in Ukraine is referred to as "Old Ukrainian", but elsewhere, and in contemporary sources, is known as the Ruthenian language, and from the end of the 18th century to the present what in Ukraine is known as "Modern Ukrainian", but elsewhere is known as just Ukrainian. Influential literary figures in the development of modern Ukrainian literature include the philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda, Ivan Kotlyarevsky, Mykola Kostomarov, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka. The earliest literary work in the Ukrainian language was recorded in 1798 when Kotlyarevsky, a playwright from Poltava in southeastern Ukraine, published his epic poem, Eneyida, a burlesque in Ukrainian, based on Virgil's Aeneid. His book was published in vernacular Ukrainian in a satirical way to avoid being censored, and is the earliest known Ukrainian published book to survive through Imperial and, later, Soviet policies on the Ukrainian language. Kotlyarevsky's work and that of another early writer using the Ukrainian vernacular language, , used the southeastern dialect spoken in the Poltava, Kharkiv and southern Kyiv regions of the Russian Empire. This dialect would serve as the basis of the Ukrainian literary language when it was developed by Shevchenko and Kulish in the mid 19th century. In order to raise its status from that of a dialect to that of a language, various elements from folklore and traditional styles were added to it. The Ukrainian literary language developed further when the Russian state banned the use of the Ukrainian language, prompting many of its writers to move to the western Ukrainian region of Galicia which was under more liberal Austrian rule; after the 1860s the majority of Ukrainian literary works were published in Austrian Galicia. During this period Galician influences were adopted in the Ukrainian literary language, particularly with respect to vocabulary involving law, government, technology, science, and administration. ==Current usage==

The use of the Ukrainian language is increasing after a long period of decline. Although there are almost fifty million ethnic Ukrainians worldwide, including 37.5 million in Ukraine in 2001 (77.8% of the total population at the time), the Ukrainian language is prevalent mainly in western and central Ukraine. In Kyiv, both Ukrainian and Russian are spoken, a notable shift from the recent past when the city was primarily Russian-speaking. In August 2022, a survey in Ukraine by Rating Group found that 85% said they speak Ukrainian or Ukrainian and Russian at home, 51% only Ukrainian, an increase from 61% and 44% in February 2014. In the same survey, 76% considered Ukrainian their native language (), up from 57% in July 2012, including 30% of Russian speakers. The top Ukrainian-language films (by IMDb rating) are: Argots Oleksa Horbach's 1951 study of argots analyzed historical primary sources (argots of professionals, thugs, prisoners, homeless, school children, etc.) paying special attention to etymological features of argots, word formation and borrowing patterns depending on the source-language (Church Slavonic, Russian, Czech, Polish, Romani, Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, German). Dialects Several modern dialects of Ukrainian exist. • dialects: • is spoken in Chernihiv (excluding the southeastern districts), in the northern part of Sumy, and in the southeastern portion of the Kyiv Oblast as well as in the adjacent areas of Russia, which include the southwestern part of the Bryansk Oblast (the area around Starodub), as well as in some places in the Kursk, Voronezh and Belgorod Oblasts. No linguistic border can be defined. The vocabulary approaches Russian as the language approaches the Russian Federation. Both Ukrainian and Russian grammar sets can be applied to this dialect. • is spoken in the northwestern part of the Kyiv Oblast, in the northern part of Zhytomyr and the northeastern part of the Rivne Oblast. • is spoken in the northern part of the Volyn Oblast, the northwestern part of the Rivne Oblast, and in the adjacent districts of the Brest Region in Belarus. The dialect spoken in Belarus uses Belarusian grammar and thus is considered by some to be a dialect of Belarusian. • dialects: • is the basis of the Standard Literary Ukrainian. It is spoken in the central part of Ukraine, primarily in the southern and eastern part of the Kyiv Oblast. In addition, the dialects spoken in Cherkasy, Poltava, and Kyiv regions are considered to be close to "standard" Ukrainian. • is spoken in Kharkiv, Sumy, Luhansk, and the northern part of Donetsk, as well as in the Voronezh and Belgorod regions of Russia. This dialect is formed from a gradual mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, with progressively more Russian in the northern and eastern parts of the region. Thus, there is no linguistic border between Russian and Ukrainian, and, thus, both grammar sets can be applied. • A dialect related to or based on the Steppe dialect is often referred to as Balachka and is spoken by the Kuban Cossacks in the Kuban region in Russia by the descendants of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who settled in that area in the late 18th century. It was formed from a gradual mixture of Russian into Ukrainian. This dialect features the use of some Russian vocabulary along with some Russian grammar. There are three main variants, which have been grouped together according to location. • dialects: • is spoken by the Boyko people on the northern side of the Carpathian Mountains in the Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk Oblasts. It can also be heard across the border in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship of Poland. • is spoken by the Hutsul people on the northern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, in the extreme southern parts of the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, and in parts of the Chernivtsi and Transcarpathian Oblasts. • is spoken by the Lemko people, whose homeland rests outside the borders of Ukraine in the Prešov Region of Slovakia along the southern side of the Carpathian Mountains, and in the southeast of modern Poland, along the northern sides of the Carpathians. • is spoken in the southern parts of the Vinnytsia and Khmelnytskyi Oblasts, in the northern part of the Odesa Oblast, and in the adjacent districts of the Cherkasy Oblast, the Kirovohrad Oblast, and the Mykolaiv Oblast. • is spoken in Rivne and Volyn, as well as in parts of Zhytomyr and Ternopil. It is also used in Chełm, Poland. • is spoken in the Chernivtsi Oblast of Ukraine. This dialect has some distinct vocabulary borrowed from Romanian. • (Kresy) is considered to be the main Galician dialect, spoken in the Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk Oblasts. Its distinguishing characteristics are the influence of Polish and the German vocabulary, which is reminiscent of the Austro-Hungarian rule. Some of the distinct words used in this dialect can be found here. • is spoken in the border area between Ukraine and Poland in the San river valley. • The is considered by Ukrainian linguists to be a dialect of Ukrainian as well: • is spoken in the Transcarpathian Oblast. • is spoken in northwestern Serbia and eastern Croatia. Rusin language of the Bačka dialect is one of the official languages of the Serbian Autonomous Province of Vojvodina. • is the Rusyn spoken in the Prešov (in Ukrainian: Pryashiv) region of Slovakia, as well as by some émigré communities, primarily in the United States of America. Neighbouring countries languages in the village of Valea Vișeului (Vyshivska Dolyna), Bistra commune, Romania All the countries neighbouring Ukraine (except for Hungary) historically have regions with a sizable Ukrainian population and therefore Ukrainian language speakers. Ukrainian is an official minority language in Belarus, Romania, and Moldova. Ukrainian diaspora Ukrainian is also spoken by a large émigrée population, particularly in Canada, the United States, and several countries of South America like Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. The founders of this population primarily emigrated from Galicia, which used to be part of Austro-Hungary before World War I, and belonged to Poland between the World Wars. The language spoken by most of them is the Galician dialect of Ukrainian from the first half of the 20th century. Compared with modern Ukrainian, the vocabulary of Ukrainians outside Ukraine reflects less influence of Russian, but often contains many loanwords from the local language. Most of the countries where it is spoken are ex-USSR, where many Ukrainians have migrated. Canada and the United States are also home to a large Ukrainian population. Broken up by country (to the nearest thousand): • Canada 200,525 (67,665 spoken at home in 2001, 148,000 spoken as "mother tongue" in 2001) Ukrainian is declaratively proclaimed as one of three official languages of the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria. Ukrainian is widely spoken within the 400,000-strong (in 1994) Ukrainian community in Brazil. It is the official language in Prudentópolis alongside Portuguese. ==Language structure==

: Cyrillic letters in this article are romanized using scientific transliteration. Grammar Ukrainian is a fusional, nominative–accusative, satellite-framed language. It exhibits T–V distinction, and is null-subject. The canonical word order of Ukrainian is SVO. Other word orders are common due to the free word order enabled by Ukrainian's inflectional system. Nouns have one of 3 genders: masculine, feminine, neuter; nouns decline for: • 7 cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, locative, vocative; • 2 numbers: singular, plural. Adjectives agree with nouns in gender, case, and number. Verbs conjugate for: • 4 tenses: past, pluperfect, present, future; • 2 voices: active, mediopassive; • 3 persons: first, second, third; • 2 numbers: singular, plural. Ukrainian verbs come in aspect pairs: perfective, and imperfective. Pairs are usually formed by a prepositional prefix and occasionally a root change. The past tense agrees with its subject in number and gender (but not person), having developed from the perfect participle. The Old East Slavic and Russian o in syllables ending in a consonant, often correspond to a Ukrainian i, as in pod → pid (під, 'under'). Thus, in the declension of nouns, the o can re-appear when it is no longer located in a closed syllable, such as rik (рік, 'year') (nom): rotsi (loc) (році). Similarly, some words can have і in some cases when most of the cases have o, for example слово (nominative singular), слова (nominative plural) but слiв (genitive plural). Ukrainian case endings are somewhat different from Old East Slavic, and the vocabulary includes a large overlay of Polish terminology. Russian na pervom etaže 'on the first floor' is in the locative (prepositional) case. The Ukrainian corresponding expression is na peršomu poversi (на першому поверсі). -omu is the standard locative (prepositional) ending, but variants in -im are common in dialect and poetry, and allowed by the standards bodies. The kh of Ukrainian poverkh (поверх) has mutated into s under the influence of the soft vowel i (k is similarly mutable into c in final positions). Phonology read in Ukrainian The Ukrainian language has six vowels, , , , , , . A number of the consonants come in three forms: hard, soft (palatalized) and long, for example, , , and or , , and . The letter represents the voiced glottal fricative , often transliterated as Latin h. It is the voiced equivalent of English . Russian speakers from Ukraine often use the soft Ukrainian in place of Russian , which comes from northern dialects of Old East Slavic. The Ukrainian alphabet has the additional letter for , which appears in a few native words such as gryndzholy 'sleigh' and gudzyk 'button'. However, appears almost exclusively in loan words, and is usually simply written . For example, loanwords from English on public signs usually use for both English g and h. Another phonetic divergence between the Ukrainian and Russian languages is the pronunciation of Cyrillic v/w. While in standard Russian it represents , in many Ukrainian dialects it denotes (following a vowel and preceding a consonant (cluster), either within a word or at a word boundary, it denotes the allophone , and like the off-glide in the English words "flow" and "cow", it forms a diphthong with the preceding vowel). Native Russian speakers will pronounce the Ukrainian as , which is one way to tell the two groups apart. As with above, Ukrainians use to render both English v and w; Russians occasionally use for w instead. Unlike Russian and most other modern Slavic languages, Ukrainian does not have final devoicing. Alphabet Ukrainian is written in a version of Cyrillic, consisting of 33 letters, representing 38 phonemes; an apostrophe is also used. Ukrainian orthography is based on the phonemic principle, with one letter generally corresponding to one phoneme, although there are a number of exceptions. The orthography also has cases where the semantic, historical, and morphological principles are applied. The modern Ukrainian alphabet is the result of a number of proposed alphabetic reforms from the 19th and early 20th centuries, in Ukraine under the Russian Empire, in Austrian Galicia, and later in Soviet Ukraine. A unified Ukrainian alphabet (the Skrypnykivka, after Mykola Skrypnyk) was officially established at a 1927 international Orthographic Conference in Kharkiv, during the period of Ukrainization in Soviet Ukraine. But the policy was reversed in the 1930s, and the Soviet Ukrainian orthography diverged from that used by the diaspora. The Ukrainian letter ge ґ was banned in the Soviet Union from 1933 until the period of Glasnost in 1990. The letter щ represents two consonants . The combination of with some of the vowels is also represented by a single letter ( = я, = є, or = ї, = ю), while = йо and the rare regional = йи are written using two letters. These iotated vowel letters and a special soft sign change a preceding consonant from hard to soft. An apostrophe is used to indicate the hardness of the sound in the cases when normally the vowel would change the consonant to soft; in other words, it functions like the yer in the Russian alphabet. A consonant letter is doubled to indicate that the sound is doubled, or long. The phonemes and do not have dedicated letters in the alphabet and are rendered with the digraphs дз and дж, respectively. is equivalent to English ds in pods, is equivalent to j in jump. As in Russian, the acute accent may be used to denote vowel stress. Transliteration Orthography Spelling search, which began in the late 18th century with the emergence of modern literary language, led to the emergence of several spelling options. In particular, there was the spelling system of Oleksii Pavlovskyi, the spelling version of "Mermaid of the Dniester" (1837), Kulishivka (P. Kulish's spelling system), Drahomanivka (produced in Kyiv in the 1870s by a group of cultural figures led by linguist P. Zhytetskyi, which included and M. Drahomanov), Zhelekhivka (system of Yevhen Zhelekhovskyi (1886), enshrined in the Ruthenian Grammar by Smal-Stotskyi and Theodore Gartner 1893). Borys Hrinchenko used some corrections in the fundamental four-volume Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language (1907–1909). Most of the spelling rules (practically based on phonetics – "write as you hear") used in Hrinchenko's dictionary are still valid. Hrinchenko's work became an informal spelling and model for Ukrainian writers and publications from 1907 until the creation of the first official Ukrainian spelling in 1918. On 17 January 1918, the Central Rada of Ukraine issued the "Main Rules of Ukrainian orthography", which, however, did not cover the entire scope of the language. On 17 May 1919, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences approved the "Main Rules of Ukrainian Orthography", which became the basis for all subsequent revisions and amendments. On 23 July 1925, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR decided to organize a State Commission for the Organization of Ukrainian Spelling (State Spelling Commission). It included more than 20 academics from the USSR, who also expressed a desire to invite representatives of Western Ukraine: Smal-Stotskyi, Volodymyr Hnatiuk and Vasyl Simovych. After almost a year of work in April 1926, the "Project of Ukrainian Spelling" was published to acquaint the general public with the new system. After several months of discussion and consideration of the project at the All-Ukrainian Spelling Conference (26 May – 6 June 1927), the Ukrainian orthography of 1928 was adopted in accordance with the RNC resolution of 6 September 1928. It went down in history as "Kharkiv" or "Skrypnik orthography" – from the place of creation, or from the surname of Skrypnyk. In 1929, Hryhorii Holoskevych published the Ukrainian Spelling Dictionary (about 40,000 words), agreed with the full spelling produced by the State Spelling Commission and approved by the People's Commissar for Education (6 September 1928). In 1933, a spelling commission headed by Andrii Khvylia branded the Ukrainian orthography of 1928 as "nationalist", immediately stopped publishing any dictionaries, and without any discussion, in a very short time (five months), created a new spelling that unified as never before the Ukrainian and Russian languages. The letter ґ was removed from the alphabet, and Ukrainian scientific terminology was revised and harmonized with Russian-Ukrainian dictionaries (the Institute of Ukrainian Scientific Language was abolished in 1930). This version of the spelling was approved by the resolution of the People's Commissar of Education of the USSR of 5 September 1933. Some minor changes were made in the spelling of 1946 and 1959 (published the following year). It was connected with the document "The rules of Russian spelling and punctuation", published in 1956. From 1960 until 1990, the 1960 edition was the official standard. After the beginning of "perestroika", the issue of improving Ukrainian spelling became relevant again: the editing of the spelling code was started by the Orthographic Commission at the LMM of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The project was also discussed in the newly established Ukrainian Language Society. T. Shevchenko (headed by Dmytro Pavlychko). The new version was approved on 14 November 1989, and published in 1990. The main achievements were the restoration of the letter ґ and the accusative case (in Soviet times it was optional and was called the accusative form). Today, despite the existence of the official spelling of the Ukrainian language, it is not the only spelling standard in use. Even in Ukraine itself, many publishers and publications use other versions of the spelling, which either tend to "skrypnykivka", or else differ from the official rules of transmission of words of foreign origin. On 22 May 2019, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine approved a new version of the orthography prepared by the Ukrainian National Commission on Spelling. The new edition brought to life some features of orthography in 1928, which were part of the Ukrainian orthographic tradition. At the same time, the commission was guided by the understanding that the language practice of Ukrainians in the second half of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century has already become part of the Ukrainian orthographic tradition. Vocabulary The Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language, in 11 volumes, contains 253,000 entries. Lexical card catalog of the Ukrainian Institute of Language Studies has six million cards. As mentioned at the top of the article, Ukrainian is most closely related lexically to Belarusian, and is also closer to Polish than to Russian (for example, можливість, mozhlyvist, "possibility", and Polish możliwość, but Russian возможность, vozmozhnost). False cognates with Russian The standard Ukrainian language which is based on the Kyiv–Poltava dialect has a plethora of false friends with the standard Russian language which is based on the dialect of Moscow. Many people intentionally do or do not use them, causing their language shift into what is known as Surzhyk, where the meaning of some words mimicking Russian could be understood out of context rather than their literal meaning in Ukrainian. ==Classification==

Ukrainian has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with other Slavic languages. It is closely related to other East Slavic languages with high levels of mutual intelligibility. The separation of the East Slavic languages is considered to be relatively recent. • The Ukrainian language, in common with all Slavic languages other than Russian, Slovak and Slovene, has retained the Common Slavic second palatalization of the velars *k, *g and *x in front of the secondary vowel *ě of the dative and locative ending in the female declension, resulting in the final sequences -cě, -zě, and -sě. For example, ruka (hand) becomes ruci in Ukrainian. In Russian, the dative and locative of ruka is ruke. • The Ukrainian language, in common with Serbo-Croatian and Slovene, has developed the ending -mo for first-person plurals in verbs (khodymo for "we walk"). • The Ukrainian language, in common with all modern Slavic languages other than Bulgarian and Macedonian, does not use articles. • Other Slavic o in closed syllables, i.e., syllables ending in a consonant, in many cases corresponds to a Ukrainian i, as in pod → pid (під, 'under'). This also includes place names such as Lviv (Львів in Ukrainian), Lwów in Polish, and Львов (Lvov) in Russian. Unlike all other Slavic languages, Ukrainian has a synthetic future (also termed inflectional future) tense which developed through the erosion and cliticization of the verb "to have" (or possibly "to take"): pysat-ymu (infinitive-future-1st sg.) I will write. Although the inflectional future (based on the verb 'to have') is characteristic of Romance languages, Ukrainian linguist A. Danylenko argues that Ukrainian differs from Romance in the choice of auxiliary, which should be interpreted as 'to take' and not 'to have.' He states that Late Common Slavic (LCS) had three verbs with the same Proto-Indo-European root : • a determined imperfective LCS *jęti: *jĭmǫ 'to take' (later superseded by numerous prefixed perfectives) • an indetermined imperfective LCS *jĭmati: jemljǫ 'to take' (which would not take any prefixes) • an imperfective LCS *jĭměti: *jĭmamĭ 'to hold, own, have' The three verbs became conflated in East Slavic due to morphological overlap, in particular of *iměti "to have" and *jati "to take" as exemplified in the Middle Ukrainian homonymic imut’ from both iměti (< *jĭměti) and jati (< *jęti). Analogous grammaticalization of the type take ("to take", "to seize") > future is found in Chinese and Hungarian. == Sample text ==

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Ukrainian:Всі люди народжуються вільними і рівними у своїй гідності та правах. Вони наділені розумом і совістю і повинні діяти у відношенні один до одного в дусі братерства.The romanization of the text into Latin alphabet:Vsi lyudy narodzhuyutsya vilnymy i rivnymy u svoyiy hidnosti ta pravakh. Vony nadileni rozumom i sovistyu i povynni diyaty u vidnoshenni odyn do odnoho v dusi braterstva.Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. ==See also==