Different Letters In Russian & Ukrainian
A simple thing to look out for when comparing the two Slavic languages is letter differences. Here are some of the biggest examples.
1. The Russian letter is in Ukrainian. In Ukrainian, there are the letters I, and that dont exist in Russian. I is equal to the Russian and to . For example, in Ukrainian is in Russian. And is rarely used in Ukrainian, there is a list of the words, as and in Russian, it is .
2. In Ukrainian there are the letters E and that are the same as Russians and E.
3. Instead of the hard sign, as in Russian, in Ukrainian, there is an apostrophe. For example in Russian is in Ukrainian. Its subtle, but its definitely noticeable once you know what youre looking for.
When it comes to Ukraine, you will be better off learning Ukrainian if you want to speak to the locals. But if you have a good level of Russian fluency, you should get by just fine because of the similar roots between the languages.
Are you thinking of learning Russian or Ukrainian? Let us know in the comments!
How Grammar Can Be Political
Other linguistic differences might be more subtle. For example, it used to be the norm in English to say “the Ukraine” instead of just “Ukraine,” which is what you hear today. This change may seem small, but there is a complex history behind it: using “the” creates the impression that Ukraine is a region, part of some larger whole, like another country. We do this in U.S. English with our regions, like the Midwest or the South . However, in 1991, when Ukraine declared independence from the USSR, the government also stated a preference that the not be used in English-language publications. That’s why you now see just “Ukraine,” to show it is an independent country.
Historical Background Of The Ukrainian Language
Historical linguists trace back the origin of the Ukrainian language to Old East Slavic. This is a language that belongs to the early medieval state of Kievan Rus. The language started developing into a form sooner after the Kingdom of Ruthenia and Kievan Rus fell.
Moreover, with Ruthenian Kivyu version of Church Slavonic also got into practice in liturgical services in the modern Ukraine group. The Ukrainian language is in practice since the late 17th century and it also has its affiliation with the establishment of the Cossack Hetmanate.
During the Ukrainian war of independence from 1804 to 1917-1921, they banned the Ukrainian language in the Russian empire. The biggest part of Ukraine including Central, Southern, and East was part of the Russian Empire at that time.
The language flourished through folk songs, itinerant musicians, and a lot of other notable authors, which has always maintained a sufficient base in western Ukraine as the language never saw a ban in this region of the country.
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What Language Is Spoken In Ukraine
in this article, we will discuss. What Language is Spoken in Ukraine?
Ukraine is situated and is a part of Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest country after Russia in Eastern Europe. Ukraine has an area covering around 600,000 square kilometers and it has a population of more than 40 million people. Kyiv is not only the largest city in Ukraine, but it is also the capital city.
The national language of the country 2s Ukrainian and a lot of people are quite fluent in the Russian language too. East Slavic language is also an official language of Ukraine and a native language of around 67% of Ukraines population.
Ethnologue which is an annual reference publication in print and online talks about the data of the living languages of the world. As listed by Ethnologue, there are 40 minority languages and dialects which are spoken in Ukraine.
Almost all of these are the Soviet Union former. Gallup which is an American analytics and advisory company in Washington D.C is famous for its public opinion polls conducted worldwide quoted that 83% of respondents of the survey preferred to have interviews in the Russian language.
Rus And Kingdom Of Ruthenia
During the Khazar period, the territory of Ukraine was settled by Iranian , Turkic , and Uralic tribes and Slavic tribes. Later, the Varangian ruler Oleg of Novgorod would seize Kyiv and establish the political entity of Kievan Rus’.
The era of Kyivan Rus is the subject of some linguistic controversy, as the language of much of the literature was purely or heavily Old Church Slavonic. Literary records from Kyivan Rus testify to substantial difference between Russian and Ruthenian form of the Ukrainian language as early as Kyivan Rus time.
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, Novgorod people did not call themselves Rus until the 14th century, calling Rus only Kyiv, Pereiaslav and Chernihiv principalities . At the same time as evidenced by the contemporary chronicles, the ruling princes of Kingdom of Ruthenia and Kyiv called themselves “People of Rus” Ruthenians, and GaliciaVolhynia was called the Kingdom of Ruthenia.
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Origins And Developments During Medieval Times
As a result of close Slavic contacts with the remnants of the Scythian and Sarmatian population north of the Black Sea, lasting into the early Middle Ages, the appearance of the voiced fricative / , in modern Ukrainian and some southern Russian dialects is explained by the assumption that it initially emerged in Scythian and related eastern Iranian dialects, from earlier common Proto-Indo-European*g and *g.
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 dakh , rura , rynok , kushnir , and majster .
The Main Linguistic Differences
Because of their shared past, Russian and Ukrainian do have a lot of words in common. Both of them also use the Cyrillic alphabet, too. But exactly how similar the two are linguistically is where things get complicated again.
Both of the alphabets consist of 33 letters. Russian has the letters , , and , which are not used in Ukrainian. Instead, Ukrainian has , , and . The pronunciation of words and letters varies as well: in Russian is pronounced like in the words seed or meet. In Ukrainian, is pronounced like a short , as in kill or live.
How about words that are written the same way in both languages? Surprisingly, they could mean totally different things. For example, : in Russian, the word means rifle butt, while in Ukrainian it means example.
Months in Russian have a lot in common with other European languages: /Yanvar January, /Fevral February, while Ukrainian saved the Slavic names: /Sichen January, /Lyutyi February.
The grammar in both languages is similar, but, predictably, there are a few differences: While Ukrainian includes the past continuous tense, there are only three tenses in Russian . In Ukrainian, one might say I am waiting for you however, there is no need for a conjunction in Russian: . Ukrainian also uses forms of to be: , and while Russian has the word itself it is completely omitted in the present tense.
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Why We Wrote This
Though the Ukrainian and Russian languages are closely related, the sociopolitical divide between their speakers couldnt be wider in Ukraine, due to the prejudices and values that have been attached to each language.
The France-sized nation of 41 million is multilingual. But Ukrainian has become dominant: Two-thirds of the population say its their mother tongue. Still, only 53% said that they mostly speak it at home, while 29% prefer Russian.
But a controversial language law has made Ukrainian mandatory for all public service workers, isolating speakers of Russian. Russian is totally out of official use and stigmatized, and Russian-language media face difficulties and are marginalized, says sociologist Nikolay Mitrokhin.
That is tarring Ukrainians who feel no loyalty to Russia. We hate Putin just as hard as any Ukrainian speaker, says Valentina, from Odessa, and the fact that Russian is our mother tongue doesnt make us Moscow spies.
It wasnt fighting Russian-speaking separatists in Ukraine that spurred Roman Nabozhniak to stop speaking Russian. It was being misidentified on vacation as a Russian.
The Most Popular Languages Of Ukraine: Ukrainian And Russian
According to the 2001 census, Ukrainian is spoken by about 67.5% of the population of Ukraine as their native language. The next most popular languages spoken in Ukraine is Russian with about 29.6% native speakers. Russian is also spoken as a second language by most Ukrainian speakers.
Ukrainian is most popular in central and western Ukraine. In central Ukraine, both Ukrainian and Russian are equally spoken in the cities but in western Ukraine, Ukrainian is the dominant language used by the urban population. In the rural communities of these regions, Ukrainian is the most spoken language. In Kiev, Russian speakers outnumber the Ukrainian speakers. In the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine, Russian is the most popular language in the cities while Ukrainian remains dominant in the rural areas.
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Should You Say Kyiv Or Kiev
Most Ukrainians, including those who live in the city, say Kyiv.
Writing forThe Conversation, Professor Bermel said: The English habit of using Kiev, Kharkov, Lvov comes from the era of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, when Russian was the dominant written language in Ukraine.
After Ukraine became independent and asserted its own linguistic identity, the Ukrainian forms Kyiv, Kharkiv and Lviv came to the fore. A similar example is Mumbai and Kolkata, which, in deference to local norms, replace the colonial names of Indian cities Bombay and Calcutta.
Many people argue that its important to recognise the modern differences in languages when highlighting the distinction between the independent Ukraine and Putins desired unity.
As Professor Bermel explains: By looking for unity in language between Russia and Ukraine, he was marshalling an argument that allowed Russia the right to intervene in what he asserted to be Russian space.
History Of Ukrainian Language
Under Lithuania/Poland, Muscovy/Russia, and Austro-Hungary
After the fall of Halych-Volhynia, Ukrainians mainly fell under the rule of Lithuania, then Poland. Local autonomy of both rule and language was a marked feature of Lithuanian rule. Polish rule, which came mainly later, was accompanied by a more assimilationist policy. The Polish language has had heavy influences on Ukrainian . As the Ukrainian language developed further, some borrowings from Tatar and Turkish occurred. Ukrainian culture and language flourished in the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century, when Ukraine was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Ukrainian was also the official language of Ukrainian provinces of the Crown of the Polish Kingdom. Among many schools established in that time, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy , founded by the Orthodox Metropolitan Peter Mogila , was the most important.
There was little sense of a Ukrainian nation in the modern sense. East Slavs called themselves Ruski in the east and Rusyny in the west, speaking Ruska mova, or simply identified themselves as Orthodox . Ukraine under the Russian Empire was called Malorossiya (Little or Lesser Rus’ or Little Russia, where the inhabitants spoke the ‘Little Russian or Southern Russian language’, a dialect of the Russian literary language.
Ukrainian speakers in the Russian Empire
Soviet era
Soviet language policy in Ukraine is divided into six policy periods
From Ukrainain101. Accessed March 21, 2019.
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A Word Please: How To Navigate Difficult Subject
Singular subjects get verbs conjugated in the singular, and plural subjects get verbs conjugated in the plural. But language can get complicated.
The easiest way to learn a language that uses a different alphabet is by using transliterated forms. Transliteration converts the sounds from one language into the alphabet of another, like the Q in al-Qaeda, which represents a sound that we dont make in English. Transliterations arent standardized, which you may have noticed when reading about Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi/Gaddafi/Kadafi. Thats why youll see different spellings of the last name of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky/Zelenskiy/Zelenskyy.
Theres no single correct way to transliterate it, and newsrooms have different processes for deciding which transliterated spelling will become their official style.
Ukrainians pronounce their capital city, Kyiv, using sounds that dont quite exist in English. But its closer to Keev than to Key-ev, which is more of a Russian pronunciation.
If you search Google for English to Ukrainian, youll arrive at a translator app where you can type in an English word or passage and Google will, with varying degrees of accuracy, translate it, showing both the Ukrainian Cyrillic form and a transliterated form. Click the little speaker button underneath to hear your term spoken aloud in proper Ukrainian.
Here, transliterated by Google, are a few Ukrainian terms worth learning.
Language Siblings Not Cousins
Today, Russian and Ukrainian are close relations: they share more vocabulary, grammar, and features of pronunciation with each other than they do with the other Slavonic languages. They both use the Cyrillic alphabet, but slightly different versions. There are four letters in Ukrainian missing from Russian , and four letters in Russian missing from Ukrainian .
As Russian and Ukrainian diverged from each other relatively recently , they still share a lot of basic and core vocabulary but not enough to be considered dialects of a single language.
One frequently cited figure is that Ukrainian and Russian share about 62% of their vocabulary. This is about the same amount of shared vocabulary that English has with Dutch, according to the same calculations. If you expand your sample by scraping internet data to compare a broader range of words than just those 200 ancient core words, the proportion of shared words declines. One computational model suggests that Russian and Ukrainian share about 55% of their vocabulary.
Using that higher figure of 62%, though, a Russian with no knowledge of Ukrainian would understand roughly five in eight words. To understand this, have a friend cross out three out of every eight words in a newspaper and see how much of the text you can follow.
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Overview Of The Ukrainian Language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Ukrainian uses a Cyrillic alphabet. It shares some vocabulary with the languages of the neighboring Slavic nations, most notably with Belarusian, Polish, Russian and Slovak.
The Ukrainian language traces its origins to the Old East Slavic language of the ancient state of Kievan Rus’. The language has persisted despite the two bans by Imperial Russia and political persecution during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ukrainian has survived mainly due to its broad base among the people of Ukraine, its folklore songs, kobzars, prominent poets like Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka.
Use of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine can be expected to increase, as the rural population migrates into the cities and the Ukrainian language enters into wider use in central Ukraine. The literary tradition of Ukrainian is also developing rapidly overcoming the consequences of the long period when its development was hindered by either direct suppression or simply the lack of the state encouragement policies.
Over The Course Of History Numerous Peoples Have Lived In What Is Modern
Like many European nations, Ukraine is a linguistically diverse country with many other languages and dialects spoken. This reflects its long history and cultural heritage that comes from numerous migrations of different peoples over centuries.
Of the nations roughly 44 million inhabitants the vast majority, just under 68 percent, consider their native language to be Ukrainian, the official national language. About 30 percent of Ukrainians consider their first language Russian, the second largest group. Russian and Ukrainian, along with Belarusian come from the East Slavic family of languages.
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The Rus Family Of Languages
The Dnieper River, which cuts through Ukraine from north to south, has been an important route for trade and migration from the Baltic to where it ends in the Black Sea throughout history. Additionally, migrating peoples settled on its fertile lands with one group in particular giving birth to the East Slavic language group.
Centered around Kyiv, Ukraine became the home to the Rus, a group of Scandinavians that settled in the area. They went on to form a loose federation called the Kievan Rus which expanded to cover broad swaths of territory encompassing modern-day Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia. From which the latter two nations derive their names.
Three Circles Of English
The Indian linguist distinguished countries where English is spoken with a . In his model,
- the “inner circle” countries have large communities of native speakers of English,
- “outer circle” countries have small communities of native speakers of English but widespread use of English as a second language in education or broadcasting or for local official purposes, and
- “expanding circle” countries are countries where many people learn English as a foreign language.
Kachru based his model on the history of how English spread in different countries, how users acquire English, and the range of uses English has in each country. The three circles change membership over time.
Three Circles of English
Countries with large communities of native speakers of English include Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand, where the majority speaks English, and South Africa, where a significant minority speaks English. The countries with the most native English speakers are, in descending order, the , the , Canada , , South Africa , , and New Zealand . In these countries, children of native speakers learn English from their parents, and local people who speak other languages and new immigrants learn English to communicate in their neighbourhoods and workplaces. The inner-circle countries provide the base from which English spreads to other countries in the world.
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