Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the List of European countries by area, second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which Russia–Ukraine border, borders it to the east and northeast. Ukraine also borders Belarus to the nor ...
Ukrainians
Ukrainians (, ) are an East Slavs, East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine. Their native tongue is Ukrainian language, Ukrainian, and the majority adhere to Eastern Orthodox Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, forming the List of contemporary eth ...
.
Written Ukrainian uses the
Ukrainian alphabet
The Ukrainian alphabet () is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, which is the official language of Ukraine. It is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th ...
, a variant of the
Cyrillic script
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...
. The
standard language
A standard language (or standard variety, standard dialect, standardized dialect or simply standard) is any language variety that has undergone substantial codification in its grammar, lexicon, writing system, or other features and that stands ...
is studied by the
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU; , ; ''NAN Ukrainy'') is a self-governing state-funded organization in Ukraine that is the main center of development of Science and technology in Ukraine, science and technology by coordinatin ...
and
Potebnia Institute of Linguistics
Potebnia Institute of Linguistics is a research institute in Ukraine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine department of literature, language, and art studies. It is focused on linguistic research and studies of linguistic ...
. Comparisons are often made between Ukrainian and
Russian
Russian(s) may refer to:
*Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*A citizen of Russia
*Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages
*''The Russians'', a b ...
, another East Slavic language, yet there is more
mutual intelligibility
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelli ...
with Belarusian,Alexander M. Schenker. 1993. "Proto-Slavonic", ''The Slavonic Languages''. (Routledge). pp. 60–121. p. 60: " hedistinction between dialect and language being blurred, there can be no unanimity on this issue in all instances..." C.F. Voegelin and F.M. Voegelin. 1977. ''Classification and Index of the World's Languages'' (Elsevier). p. 311, "In terms of immediate mutual intelligibility, the East Slavic zone is a single language." Bernard Comrie. 1981. ''The Languages of the Soviet Union'' (Cambridge). pp. 145–146: "The three East Slavonic languages are very close to one another, with very high rates of mutual intelligibility...The separation of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian as distinct languages is relatively recent...Many Ukrainians in fact speak a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, finding it difficult to keep the two languages apart..." The Swedish linguist Alfred Jensen wrote in 1916 that the difference between the
Russian
Russian(s) may refer to:
*Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*A citizen of Russia
*Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages
*''The Russians'', a b ...
and Ukrainian languages was significant and that it could be compared to the difference between Swedish and Danish. Jensen, Alfred. ''Slaverna och världskriget. Reseminnen och intryck från Karpaterna till Balkan 1915–16.''. Albert Bonniers förlag, Stockholm, 1916, p. 145. and a closer lexical distance to West SlavicPolish and South SlavicBulgarian.
Ukrainian is a descendant of
Old East Slavic
Old East Slavic (traditionally also Old Russian) was a language (or a group of dialects) used by the East Slavs from the 7th or 8th century to the 13th or 14th century, until it diverged into the Russian language, Russian and Ruthenian language ...
, a language spoken in the
medieval
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with the fall of the West ...
state of
Kievan Rus'
Kievan Rus', also known as Kyivan Rus,.
* was the first East Slavs, East Slavic state and later an amalgam of principalities in Eastern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century.John Channon & Robert Hudson, ''Penguin Historical At ...
. In the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a sovereign state in northeastern Europe that existed from the 13th century, succeeding the Kingdom of Lithuania, to the late 18th century, when the territory was suppressed during the 1795 Partitions of Poland, ...
, the language developed into Ruthenian, where it became an official language, before a process of
Polonization
Polonization or Polonisation ()In Polish historiography, particularly pre-WWII (e.g., L. Wasilewski. As noted in Смалянчук А. Ф. (Smalyanchuk 2001) Паміж краёвасцю і нацыянальнай ідэяй. Польскі ...
began in the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, also referred to as Poland–Lithuania or the First Polish Republic (), was a federation, federative real union between the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania ...
. By the 18th century, Ruthenian diverged into regional variants, and the modern Ukrainian language developed in the territory of present-day Ukraine.
Russification
Russification (), Russianisation or Russianization, is a form of cultural assimilation in which non-Russians adopt Russian culture and Russian language either voluntarily or as a result of a deliberate state policy.
Russification was at times ...
saw the Ukrainian language banned as a subject from schools and as a language of instruction in the
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...
, and continued in various ways in the
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
.Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and the Mirage of Democracy by Jonathan Steele,
Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press (HUP) is an academic publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University. It is a member of the Association of University Presses. Its director since 2017 is George Andreou.
The pres ...
, 1988, (p. 217) Even so, the language continued to see use throughout the country, and remained particularly strong in
Western Ukraine
Western Ukraine or West Ukraine (, ) refers to the western territories of Ukraine. There is no universally accepted definition of the territory's boundaries, but the contemporary Ukrainian administrative regions ( oblasts) of Chernivtsi, I ...
.Purism and Language: A Study in Modem Ukrainian and Belorussian Nationalism by Paul Wexler,
Indiana University Press
Indiana University Press, also known as IU Press, is an academic publisher founded in 1950 at Indiana University that specializes in the humanities and social sciences. Its headquarters are located in Bloomington, Indiana. IU Press publishes ...
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
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often prefer ...
developments of the time, such as the merger of the Old East Slavic vowel
phonemes
A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...
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
Aleksey Aleksandrovich Shakhmatov (, – 16 August 1920) was a Russian philology, philologist and historian credited with laying the foundations for the science of Textual criticism, textology. Shakhmatov held the title of Doctor of Russ ...
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
Stepan Yosypovych Smal-Stotsky (, ) was a Ukrainian linguist and academician, Slavist, cultural and political figure, member of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, and ambassador of the West Ukrainian People's Republic in Prague.
His docto ...
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
George Shevelov (born ''Yuri Schneider'', 17 December 1908 – 12 April 2002) was a Ukrainian professor, linguist, philologist, essayist, literary historian, and literary critic. A longtime professor of Slavic philology at Columbia University, he ...
'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.
Origins and developments during medieval times
As a result of close Slavic contacts with the remnants of the
Scythian
The Scythians ( or ) or Scyths (, but note Scytho- () in composition) and sometimes also referred to as the Pontic Scythians, were an ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic people who had migrated during the 9th to 8th centuries BC fr ...
and
Sarmatian
The Sarmatians (; ; Latin: ) were a large confederation of Ancient Iranian peoples, ancient Iranian Eurasian nomads, equestrian nomadic peoples who dominated the Pontic–Caspian steppe, Pontic steppe from about the 5th century BCE to the 4t ...
population north of the
Black Sea
The Black Sea is a marginal sea, marginal Mediterranean sea (oceanography), mediterranean sea lying between Europe and Asia, east of the Balkans, south of the East European Plain, west of the Caucasus, and north of Anatolia. It is bound ...
, lasting into the early
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...
, the appearance of the voiced fricative γ/г (romanized "h"), in modern Ukrainian and some southern Russian dialects is explained by the assumption that it initially emerged in
Scythian
The Scythians ( or ) or Scyths (, but note Scytho- () in composition) and sometimes also referred to as the Pontic Scythians, were an ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic people who had migrated during the 9th to 8th centuries BC fr ...
and related eastern Iranian dialects, from earlier common
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-Euro ...
''*g'' and ''*gʰ''.
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
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...
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").History of the Ukrainian Language. R. Smal-Stocky. In ''Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia.''(1963). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 490–500
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 Muscovy or Moscovia () is an alternative name for the Principality of Moscow (1263–1547) and the Tsardom of Russia (1547–1721).
It may also refer to:
*Muscovy Company, an English trading company chartered in 1555
*Muscovy duck (''Cairina mosch ...
, whereas the south-western areas (including
Kyiv
Kyiv, also Kiev, is the capital and most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city of Ukraine. Located in the north-central part of the country, it straddles both sides of the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2022, its population was 2, ...
) were incorporated into the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a sovereign state in northeastern Europe that existed from the 13th century, succeeding the Kingdom of Lithuania, to the late 18th century, when the territory was suppressed during the 1795 Partitions of Poland, ...
. 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
Liturgy is the customary public ritual of worship performed by a religious group. As a religious phenomenon, liturgy represents a communal response to and participation in the sacred through activities reflecting praise, thanksgiving, remembra ...
standardised language of
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic ( ) is the first Slavic languages, Slavic literary language and the oldest extant written Slavonic language attested in literary sources. It belongs to the South Slavic languages, South Slavic subgroup of the ...
, 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
The ''szlachta'' (; ; ) were the nobility, noble estate of the realm in the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Depending on the definition, they were either a warrior "caste" or a social ...
Latin
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
. 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).
Significant contact with
Tatars
Tatars ( )Tatar in the Collins English Dictionary are a group of Turkic peoples across Eas ...
and Turks resulted in many Turkic words, particularly those involving military matters and steppe industry, being adopted into the Ukrainian language. Examples include ''torba'' (bag) and ''tyutyun'' (tobacco).
Because of the substantial number of loanwords from Polish, German, Czech and Latin, early modern vernacular Ukrainian (''prosta mova'', " simple speech") had more lexical similarity with
West Slavic languages
The West Slavic languages are a subdivision of the Slavic language group. They include Polish, Czech, Slovak, Kashubian, Silesian, Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian. The languages have traditionally been spoken across a mostly continuous re ...
than with Russian or Church Slavonic. 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
Zynoviy Bohdan Mykhailovych Khmelnytsky of the Abdank coat of arms (Ruthenian language, Ruthenian: Ѕѣнові Богданъ Хмелнiцкiи; modern , Polish language, Polish: ; 15956 August 1657) was a Ruthenian nobility, Ruthenian noble ...
, head of the
Zaporozhian Host
The Zaporozhian Host (), or Zaporozhian Sich () is a term for a military force inhabiting or originating from Zaporizhzhia, the territory in what is Southern and Central Ukraine today, beyond the rapids of the Dnieper River, from the 15th to th ...
, 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 East Slavic (traditionally also Old Russian) was a language (or a group of dialects) used by the East Slavs from the 7th or 8th century to the 13th or 14th century, until it diverged into the Russian language, Russian and Ruthenian language ...
.
* 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
Eastern Orthodoxy, otherwise known as Eastern Orthodox Christianity or Byzantine Christianity, is one of the three main Branches of Christianity, branches of Chalcedonian Christianity, alongside Catholic Church, Catholicism and Protestantism ...
feast day
The calendar of saints is the traditional Christian method of organizing a liturgical year by associating each day with one or more saints and referring to the day as the feast day or feast of said saint. The word "feast" in this context does n ...
Kievan Rus'
Kievan Rus', also known as Kyivan Rus,.
* was the first East Slavs, East Slavic state and later an amalgam of principalities in Eastern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century.John Channon & Robert Hudson, ''Penguin Historical At ...
( 880–1240) is the subject of some linguistic controversy, as the language of much of the literature was purely or heavily
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic ( ) is the first Slavic languages, Slavic literary language and the oldest extant written Slavonic language attested in literary sources. It belongs to the South Slavic languages, South Slavic subgroup of the ...
. Some theorists see an early Ukrainian stage in language development here, calling it Old Ruthenian; others term this era
Old East Slavic
Old East Slavic (traditionally also Old Russian) was a language (or a group of dialects) used by the East Slavs from the 7th or 8th century to the 13th or 14th century, until it diverged into the Russian language, Russian and Ruthenian language ...
. 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
The Novgorod Republic () was a medieval state that existed from the 12th to 15th centuries in northern Russia, stretching from the Gulf of Finland in the west to the northern Ural Mountains in the east. Its capital was the city of Novgorod. The ...
did not call themselves ''Rus'' until the 14th century; earlier Novgorodians reserved the term ''Rus'' for the
Kiev
Kyiv, also Kiev, is the capital and most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city of Ukraine. Located in the north-central part of the country, it straddles both sides of the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2022, its population was 2, ...
Chernigov
Chernihiv (, ; , ) is a city and municipality in northern Ukraine, which serves as the administrative center of Chernihiv Oblast and Chernihiv Raion within the oblast. Chernihiv's population is
The city was designated as a Hero City of Ukrain ...
principalities. At the same time as evidenced by contemporary chronicles, the ruling princes and kings of Galicia–Volhynia and Kiev called themselves "people of Rus" (in foreign sources called "
Ruthenians
A ''Ruthenian'' and ''Ruthene'' are exonyms of Latin language, Latin origin, formerly used in Eastern and Central Europe as common Ethnonym, ethnonyms for East Slavs, particularly during the late medieval and early modern periods. The Latin term ...
"), and Galicia–Volhynia has alternately been called the Principality or Kingdom of Ruthenia.
Also according to Andrey Zaliznyak, the Novgorodian dialect differed significantly from that of other dialects of Kievan Rus during the 11th–12th century, but
started becoming more similar to them around 13th–15th centuries. The modern Russian language hence developed from the fusion of this Novgorodian dialect and the common dialect spoken by the other Kievan Rus, whereas the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian languages developed from the dialects which did not differ from each other in a significant way.
Under Lithuania/Poland and Muscovy/Russia
After the fall of the Kingdom of Ruthenia, Ukrainians mainly fell under the rule of Lithuania and then
Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...
. Local autonomy of both rule and language was a marked feature of Lithuanian rule. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Old East Slavic became the language of the chancellery and gradually evolved into the Ruthenian language. Polish rule, which came later, was accompanied by a more assimilationist policy. By the 1569
Union of Lublin
The Union of Lublin (; ) was signed on 1 July 1569 in Lublin, Poland, and created a single state, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest countries in Europe at the time. It replaced the personal union of the Crown of the Kingd ...
that formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a significant part of Ukrainian territory was moved from Lithuanian rule to Polish administration, resulting in cultural
Polonization
Polonization or Polonisation ()In Polish historiography, particularly pre-WWII (e.g., L. Wasilewski. As noted in Смалянчук А. Ф. (Smalyanchuk 2001) Паміж краёвасцю і нацыянальнай ідэяй. Польскі ...
and visible attempts to colonize Ukraine by the Polish nobility.
Many Ukrainian nobles learned the Polish language and converted to Catholicism during that period in order to maintain their lofty aristocratic position. Lower classes were less affected because literacy was common only in the upper class and clergy. The latter were also under significant Polish pressure after the Union with the Catholic Church. Most of the educational system was gradually Polonized. In Ruthenia, the language of administrative documents gradually shifted towards Polish.
Polish has had heavy influences on Ukrainian (particularly in
Western Ukraine
Western Ukraine or West Ukraine (, ) refers to the western territories of Ukraine. There is no universally accepted definition of the territory's boundaries, but the contemporary Ukrainian administrative regions ( oblasts) of Chernivtsi, I ...
). The southwestern Ukrainian dialects are transitional to Polish.Geoffrey Hull, Halyna Koscharsky. Contours and Consequences of the Lexical Divide in Ukrainian ". ''Australian Slavonic and East European Studies''. Vol. 20, no. 1-2. 2006. pp. 140–147. 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 17th century, when Ukraine was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, albeit in spite of being part of the PLC, not as a result. Among many schools established in that time, the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium (the predecessor of the modern Kyiv-Mohyla Academy), founded by the OrthodoxMetropolitanPeter Mogila, was the most important. At that time languages were associated more with religions: Catholics spoke Polish, and members of the Orthodox church spoke Ruthenian.
The 1654
Pereiaslav Agreement
The Pereiaslav Agreement or Pereyaslav AgreementPereyaslav Agreement Bri ...
between
Cossack Hetmanate
The Cossack Hetmanate (; Cossack Hetmanate#Name, see other names), officially the Zaporozhian Host (; ), was a Ukrainian Cossacks, Cossack state. Its territory was located mostly in central Ukraine, as well as in parts of Belarus and southwest ...
and
Alexis of Russia
Alexei Mikhailovich (, ; – ), also known as Alexis, was Tsar of all Russia from 1645 until his death in 1676. He was the second Russian tsar from the House of Romanov.
He was the first tsar to sign laws on his own authority and his council ...
divided Ukraine between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Tsardom of Russia. During the following century, both monarchies became increasingly intolerant of Ukrainian own cultural and political aspirations. 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
Russification (), Russianisation or Russianization, is a form of cultural assimilation in which non-Russians adopt Russian culture and Russian language either voluntarily or as a result of a deliberate state policy.
Russification was at times ...
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
The First Partition of Poland took place in 1772 as the first of three partitions that eventually ended the existence of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth by 1795. The growth of power in the Russian Empire threatened the Kingdom of Prussia an ...
, when the lands annexed by the Austrian
Habsburg monarchy
The Habsburg monarchy, also known as Habsburg Empire, or Habsburg Realm (), was the collection of empires, kingdoms, duchies, counties and other polities (composite monarchy) that were ruled by the House of Habsburg. From the 18th century it is ...
were reorganised as the
Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria
The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, also known as Austrian Galicia or colloquially Austrian Poland, was a constituent possession of the Habsburg monarchy in the historical region of Galicia (Eastern Europe), Galicia in Eastern Europe. The Cr ...
, 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
The Ruthenian Uniate Church (; ; ; ) was a Catholic particular churches and liturgical rites, particular church of the Catholic Church in the territory of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was created in 1595/1596 by those clergy of the Ea ...
) rather than Roman Catholic, and that their liturgical language was
Church Slavonic
Church Slavonic is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. The ...
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
Maria Theresa (Maria Theresia Walburga Amalia Christina; 13 May 1717 – 29 November 1780) was the ruler of the Habsburg monarchy from 1740 until her death in 1780, and the only woman to hold the position suo jure, in her own right. She was the ...
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
Canon or Canons may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* Canon (fiction), the material accepted as officially written by an author or an ascribed author
* Literary canon, an accepted body of works considered as high culture
** Western canon, th ...
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
A medium of instruction (plural: media of instruction, or mediums of instruction) is a language used in teaching. It may or may not be the official language of the country or territory. If the first language of students is different from the offic ...
. 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
The Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (named after Ivan Franko, ) is a state-sponsored university in Lviv, Ukraine. Since 1940 the university is named after Ukrainian poet Ivan Franko.
The university is the oldest institution of highe ...
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
Jernej Kopitar, also known as Bartholomeus Kopitar (21 August 1780 – 11 August 1844), was a Slovene linguist and philologist working in Vienna. He also worked as the Imperial censor for Slovene literature in Vienna. He is perhaps best known ...
(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
The revolutions of 1848 in the Austrian Empire took place from March 1848 to November 1849. Much of the revolutionary activity had a nationalism, nationalist character: the Austrian Empire, ruled from Vienna, included ethnic Germans, Hungarians, ...
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 to 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, 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 that still heavily leaned on Church Slavonic, while 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
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (; ; 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861) was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist, and ethnographer. He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts and a member of the Brotherhood o ...
(died 1861), who was fiercely anti-Russian and Ukrainophile, leading many earlier Galician Ruthenians to abandon their 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
The term Dnieper Ukraine
(), usually refers to territory on either side of the middle course of the Dnieper River. The Ukrainian name derives from ''nad‑'' (prefix: "above, over") + ''Dnipró'' ("Dnieper") + ''‑shchyna'' (suffix denoting a g ...
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 ''Ukrajins'ka 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 1811, by order of the Russian government, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was closed.
In 1847 the Brotherhood of St Cyril and Methodius was terminated. The same year
Taras Shevchenko
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (; ; 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861) was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist, and ethnographer. He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts and a member of the Brotherhood o ...
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
Arkhangelsk (, ) is a types of inhabited localities in Russia, city and the administrative center of Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia. It lies on both banks of the Northern Dvina near its mouth into the White Sea. The city spreads for over along the ...
. 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".Валуевский циркуляр, full text of the Valuyev circular on
Wikisource
Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content source text, textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one f ...
Although the
name of Ukraine
The earliest known usage of the name ''Ukraine'' ( , , ; ) appears in the Hypatian Codex of 1425 under the year 1187 in reference to a part of the territory of Kievan Rus'.
The use of "the Ukraine" has been officially deprecated by the Ukra ...
is known since 1187, it was not applied to the language until the mid-19th century.https://www.husj.harvard.edu/articles/the-battle-for-ukrainian-an-introduction "It was during this period that elites on both sides of the border began to apply the term Ukrainian to the varieties formerly called Ruthenian and Little Russian." The
linguonym
Linguonym (from / language, and / name), also known as glossonym (from / language) or glottonym (from Attic Greek: γλῶττα / language), is a linguistic term that designates a proper name of an individual language, or a language family. Th ...
''Ukrainian language'' appears in Yakub 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. In Galicia, the earliest applications of the term ''Ukrainian'' to the language were in the hyphenated names ''Ukrainian-Ruthenian'' (1866, by Paulin Święcicki) or ''Ruthenian-Ukrainian'' (1871, by Panteleimon Kulish and Ivan Puluj), with non-hyphenated ''Ukrainian language'' appearing shortly thereafter (in 1878, by Mykhailo Drahomanov).
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
Bukovina
Bukovina or ; ; ; ; , ; see also other languages. is a historical region at the crossroads of Central and Eastern Europe. It is located on the northern slopes of the central Eastern Carpathians and the adjoining plains, today divided betwe ...
, 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
The Russian Revolution was a period of Political revolution (Trotskyism), political and social revolution, social change in Russian Empire, Russia, starting in 1917. This period saw Russia Dissolution of the Russian Empire, abolish its mona ...
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
The Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR) was a short-lived state in Eastern Europe. Prior to its proclamation, the Central Council of Ukraine was elected in March 1917 Ukraine after the Russian Revolution, as a result of the February Revolution, ...
, shortly joined by the
West Ukrainian People's Republic
The West Ukrainian People's Republic (; West Ukrainian People's Republic#Name, see other names) was a short-lived state that controlled most of Eastern Galicia from November 1918 to July 1919. It included major cities of Lviv, Ternopil, Kolom ...
). During this brief independent statehood the stature and use of Ukrainian greatly improved.
Speakers in the Russian Empire
In the Russian Empire Census of 1897 the following picture emerged, with Ukrainian being the second most spoken language of the Russian Empire. According to the Imperial census's terminology, the Russian language (''Русскій'') was subdivided into Ukrainian (Малорусскій, ' Little Russian'), what is known as Russian today (Великорусскій, ' Great Russian'), and Belarusian (Бѣлорусскій, 'White Russian').
The following table shows the distribution of settlement by native language (''"по родному языку"'') in 1897 in
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...
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
Odesa, also spelled Odessa, is the third most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city and List of hromadas of Ukraine, municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern ...
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...
, 1992, (page 12/13)
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.
Soviet era
During the seven-decade-long
Soviet era
The history of the Soviet Union (USSR) (1922–91) began with the ideals of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and ended in dissolution amidst economic collapse and political disintegration. Established in 1922 following the Russian Civil War, ...
, the Ukrainian language held the formal position of the principal local language in the
Ukrainian SSR
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, abbreviated as the Ukrainian SSR, UkrSSR, and also known as Soviet Ukraine or just Ukraine, was one of the Republics of the Soviet Union, constituent republics of the Soviet Union from 1922 until 1991. ...
.The Ukraine , ''Life'', 26 October 1946 However, practice was often a different story: Ukrainian always had to compete with Russian, and the attitudes of the Soviet leadership towards Ukrainian varied from encouragement and tolerance to de facto banishment.
Officially, there was no
state language
An official language is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as, "the language or one of the languages that is accepted by a country's government, is taught in schools, used in the courts of law, etc." Depending on the decree, establishmen ...
in the Soviet Union until the very end when it was proclaimed in 1990 that Russian language was the all-Union state language and that the constituent
republics
A republic, based on the Latin phrase '' res publica'' ('public affair' or 'people's affair'), is a state in which political power rests with the public (people), typically through their representatives—in contrast to a monarchy. Although ...
had rights to declare additional state languages within their jurisdictions. 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
The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (, ), also known as Soviet Uzbekistan, the Uzbek SSR, UzSSR, or simply Uzbekistan and rarely Uzbekia, was a union republic of the Soviet Union. It was governed by the Uzbek branch of the Soviet Communist P ...
, and so on. However, Russian was used as the
lingua franca
A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a Natural language, language systematically used to make co ...
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
After the death of Stalin (1953), a general policy of relaxing the language policies of the past was implemented (1958 to 1963). The
Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and the Premier of the Soviet Union, Chai ...
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
Protection is any measure taken to guard something against damage caused by outside forces. Protection can be provided to physical objects, including organisms, to systems, and to intangible things like civil and political rights. Although ...
'' 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
Petro Yukhymovych Shelest ( – 22 January 1996) was a Ukrainian Soviet politician who served as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party from 1965 until his removal in 1972. Ideologically a social moderate and a national communist, he ...
, pursued a policy of defending Ukraine's interests within the Soviet Union. He proudly promoted the beauty 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.
Shcherbytsky period
The new party boss from 1972 to 1989, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, purged the local party, was fierce in suppressing dissent, and insisted Russian be spoken at all official functions, even at local levels. His policy of Russification was lessened only slightly after 1985.
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
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country's dissolution in 1991. He served a ...
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
Donetsk ( , ; ; ), formerly known as Aleksandrovka, Yuzivka (or Hughesovka), Stalin, and Stalino, is an industrial city in eastern Ukraine located on the Kalmius River in Donetsk Oblast, which is currently occupied by Russia as the capita ...
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
The Great Purge, or the Great Terror (), also known as the Year of '37 () and the Yezhovshchina ( , ), was a political purge in the Soviet Union that took place from 1936 to 1938. After the Assassination of Sergei Kirov, assassination of ...
, and most of
Stalinism
Stalinism (, ) is the Totalitarianism, totalitarian means of governing and Marxism–Leninism, Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953), 1927 to 1953 by dictator Jose ...
. And this region became the center of a hearty, if only partial, renaissance of the Ukrainian language during independence.
Independence in the modern era
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
A first language (L1), native language, native tongue, or mother tongue is the first language a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period hypothesis, critical period. In some countries, 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.
According to the official 2001 census data, 92.3% of Kyiv region population responded "Ukrainian" to the ''native language'' (''ridna mova'') census question, compared with 88.4% in 1989, and 7.2% responded "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
Mykhailo Mykhailovych Kotsiubynsky (; 17 September 1864 – 25 April 1913) was a Ukrainian author whose writings described typical Ukrainian life at the start of the 20th century. Kotsiubynsky's early stories were described as examples of an e ...
, Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka. The earliest literary work in the Ukrainian language was recorded in 1798 when Kotlyarevsky, a playwright from
Poltava
Poltava (, ; , ) is a city located on the Vorskla, Vorskla River in Central Ukraine, Central Ukraine. It serves as the administrative center of Poltava Oblast as well as Poltava Raion within the oblast. It also hosts the administration of Po ...
in southeastern Ukraine, published his
epic poem
In poetry, an epic is a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants. With regard to ...
, ''Eneyida'', a
burlesque
A burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects.
in Ukrainian, based on
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro (; 15 October 70 BC21 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Rome, ancient Roman poet of the Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Augustan period. He composed three of the most fa ...
's ''
Aeneid
The ''Aeneid'' ( ; or ) is a Latin Epic poetry, epic poem that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Troy, Trojan who fled the Trojan War#Sack of Troy, fall of Troy and travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Ancient Rome ...
''. 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
Ukrainians (, ) are an East Slavs, East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine. Their native tongue is Ukrainian language, Ukrainian, and the majority adhere to Eastern Orthodox Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, forming the List of contemporary eth ...
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.
The shift is believed to be caused mainly by an influx of migrants from western regions of Ukraine but also by some Kyivans opting to use the language they speak at home more widely in public settings. Public signs and announcements in Kyiv are displayed in Ukrainian. In southern and eastern Ukraine, Russian is the prevalent language in most large and some small cities. According to the Ukrainian Census of 2001, 87.8% of people living in Ukraine were fluent in Ukrainian.
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.
Popular culture
Music
Ukrainian has become popular in other countries through movies and songs performed in the Ukrainian language. The most popular Ukrainian rock bands, such as Okean Elzy, Vopli Vidopliassova, and BoomBox (Ukrainian band), BoomBox perform regularly in tours across Europe, Israel, North America and especially Russia. In countries with significant Ukrainian populations, bands singing in the Ukrainian language sometimes reach top places on the charts, such as Enej (a band from Poland). Other notable Ukrainian-language bands are The Ukrainians from the United Kingdom, Klooch from Canada, Ukrainian Village Band from the United States, and the Kuban Cossack Choir from the Kuban region in Russia.
Cinema
The 2010s saw a revival of Ukrainian cinema. 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 oblast, Chernihiv (excluding the southeastern districts), in the northern part of Sumy Oblast, 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 Oblast, Kursk, Voronezh Oblast, Voronezh and Belgorod Oblast, 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 Oblast, 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 language, 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 Oblast, Cherkasy, Poltava Oblast, Poltava, and Kyiv regions are considered to be close to "standard" Ukrainian.
** is spoken in Kharkiv Oblast, Kharkiv, Sumy Oblast, Sumy, Luhansk Oblast, Luhansk, and the northern part of Donetsk Oblast, Donetsk, as well as in the Voronezh Oblast, Voronezh and Belgorod Oblast, 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 is spoken in southern and southeastern Ukraine. This dialect was originally the main language of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.
** 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.Viktor Zakharchenko, Folk songs of the Kuban, 1997 , Retrieved 7 November 2007 There are three main variants, which have been grouped together according to location.
* dialects:
** is spoken by the Boyko, Boyko people on the northern side of the Carpathian Mountains in the Lviv Oblast, Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblasts. It can also be heard across the border in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship of Poland.
** is spoken by the Hutsuls, 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 Oblast, Chernivtsi and Transcarpathian Oblast, Transcarpathian Oblasts.
** is spoken by the Lemkos, Lemko people, whose Lemkivshchyna, 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 Oblast, Vinnytsia and Khmelnytskyi Oblast, 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 Oblast, Rivne and Volyn Oblast, Volyn, as well as in parts of Zhytomyr Oblast, Zhytomyr and Ternopil Oblast, 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 language, Romanian.
** (Kresy) is considered to be the main Galician dialect, spoken in the Lviv Oblast, Lviv, Ternopil Oblast, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, 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
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 Canadian Ukrainian, 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 (Central Europe), 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 Post-Soviet states, 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):
# Russia 1,129,838 (according to the Russian Census (2010), 2010 census);
# 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 Brazilian, Ukrainian community in Brazil.Oksana Boruszenko and Rev. Danyil Kozlinsky (1994). ''Ukrainians in Brazil'' (Chapter), in ''Ukraine and Ukrainians Throughout the World'', edited by Ann Lencyk Pawliczko, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, pp. 443–454 It is the official language in Prudentópolis alongside Portuguese language, Portuguese.
Language structure
: ''Cyrillic letters in this article are Romanization of Ukrainian, romanized using Romanization of Ukrainian#Scientific transliteration, scientific transliteration.''
Grammar
Ukrainian is a fusional language, fusional, Nominative–accusative alignment, nominative–accusative, verb framing, satellite-framed language. It exhibits T–V distinction, and is null-subject language, null-subject. The canonical word order of Ukrainian is subject–verb–object, SVO. Other word orders are common due to the free word order enabled by Ukrainian's inflectional system.
Nouns have one of 3 grammatical gender, genders: masculine, feminine, neuter; nouns declension, decline for:
* 7 grammatical cases, cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental case, instrumental, locative case, locative, vocative;
* 2 grammatical number, numbers: grammatical number#singular vs plural, singular, plural.
Adjectives agreement (linguistics), agree with nouns in gender, grammatical case, case, and grammatical number, number.
Verbs Grammatical conjugation, conjugate for:
* 4 grammatical tense, tenses: past tense, past, pluperfect, present tense, present, future tense, future;
* 2 grammatical voice, voices: active voice, active, mediopassive voice, mediopassive;
* 3 grammatical person, persons: first, second, third;
* 2 grammatical number, numbers: grammatical number#singular vs plural, singular, plural.
Ukrainian verbs come in Grammatical aspect in Slavic languages, aspect pairs: perfective aspect, perfective, and imperfective aspect, imperfective. Pairs are usually formed by a prepositional prefix and occasionally a apophony, root change. The past tense agrees with its subject (grammar), subject in number and gender (but ''not'' Grammatical person, person), having developed from the perfect (grammar), 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') (nominative case, nom): ''rotsi'' (locative case, 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
The Ukrainian language has six vowels, , , , , , .
A number of the consonants come in three forms: hard, soft (Palatalization (phonetics), palatalized) and geminate consonant, long, for example, , , and or , , and .
The letter represents the voiced glottal fricative , often transliterated as Latin ''h''. It is the Voiced consonant, 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 ''gryndžoly'' '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 script, 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 ''Ukrainian orthography of 1928, 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 Ukrainian diaspora, diaspora. The Ukrainian letter Ghe with upturn, 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 Digraph (orthography), 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 Shashkevychivka, 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 Theodor Gartner, Theodore Gartner 1893).
Borys Grinchenko, 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 Council of Ukraine, 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 Ukrainian orthography of 1933, 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 Vocative case, 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 Government of Ukraine, Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine approved a Ukrainian orthography of 2019, 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
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelli ...
with other Slavic languages. It is closely related to other East Slavic languages with high levels of mutual intelligibility. Ukrainian is considered to be most closely related to Belarusian.
The separation of the East Slavic languages is considered to be relatively recent. In the 19th century, the question of whether the Ukrainian, Belorusian language, Belarusian and
Russian
Russian(s) may refer to:
*Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*A citizen of Russia
*Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages
*''The Russians'', a b ...
languages were dialects of a single language or three separate languages was actively discussed, with the debate affected by linguistic and political factors. The political situation (Ukraine and Belarus being mainly part of the Russian Empire at the time) and the historical existence of the medieval state of Kievan Rus', which occupied large parts of these three nations, led to the creation of the common classification known later as the East Slavic languages. The underlying theory of the grouping is their descent from a common ancestor. In modern times, Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian are usually listed by linguists as separate languages.
The Ukrainians were predominantly Peasant, peasants and petit bourgeois, petits bourgeois. In 1897, 93% of Ukrainians were peasants. As a result, the Ukrainian language was mostly vernacular and few earlier literary works from the period can be found. In the cities, Ukrainian coexisted with Church Slavonic language, Church Slavonic—a literary language of religion that evolved from Old Church Slavonic—and later Polish and Russian, both languages which were more often used in formal writing and communication during that time.
Differences from other Slavic languages
The Ukrainian language has the following similarities with and differences from other Slavic languages:
*Like all Slavic languages with the exception of
Russian
Russian(s) may refer to:
*Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*A citizen of Russia
*Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages
*''The Russians'', a b ...
, Belarusian, standard written Slovak and Slovene language, Slovene, the Ukrainian language has preserved the Common Slavic vocative case. When addressing one's sister (''sestra'') she is referred to as ''sestro.'' In the Russian language the vocative case has been almost entirely replaced by the nominative (except for a handful of vestigial forms, e.g. ''Bozhe'' "God!" and ''Gospodi'' "Lord!").J. B. Rudnyckyj. (1963) . The Position of the Ukrainian Language among the Slavic languages. In ''Ukraine: A concise Encyclopedia''. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 445–448.
*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"). In all cases, it resulted from lengthening of the Common Slavic -''mŭ''.
*The Ukrainian language, along with Russian and Belarusian, has changed the Common Slavic word-initial ''ye''- into ''o'', such as in the words ''ozero'' (lake) and ''odyn'' (one).
*The Ukrainian language, in common with Czech, Slovak, Upper Sorbian, Belarusian and southern Russian dialects, has changed the Common Slavic "g" into an "h" sound (for example, ''noha'' – leg).
*The Ukrainian language, in common with some northern Russian and Croatian dialects, has transformed the Common Slavic ''yě'' into ''i'' (for example, ''lis'' – forest).
*The Ukrainian language, in common with Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovene, has simplified the Common Slavic ''tl'' and ''dl'' into ''l'' (for example, ''mela'' – she swept").
*The Ukrainian language, in common with the most of Slavic ones, is a Isochrony, stress-timed language, in which syllables may last different amounts of time, but there is perceived to be a fairly constant amount of time (on average) between consecutive stressed syllables.
*The Ukrainian language, in common with all modern Slavic languages other than Bulgarian and Macedonian, does not use Article (linguistics), 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 Clitic, cliticization of the verb "to have" (or possibly "to take"): ''pysat-ymu'' (infinitive-future-1st sg.) ''I will write''.Bernd Kortmann, Johan van der Auwera (2011). ''The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide'', Volume 2. p. 103 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 language, Chinese and Hungarian language, Hungarian.Andrii Danylenko. "Is There Any Inflectional Future in East Slavic? A Case of Ukrainian against Romance Reopened." ''Journal of the Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University'', 2007. PP. 147–177.
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 Ukrainian, romanization of the text into Latin alphabet:
''Vsi lyudy narodzhuyut'sya vil'nymy 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
* Chronology of Ukrainian language suppression
* Languages of Ukraine
* Language policy in Ukraine
* Ukrainian Braille
* Ukrainian Sign Language
Notes
References
Sources
*
* Lesyuk, Mykol "Різнотрактування історії української мови"
*
* (revised and updated edition)
* Nimchuk, Vasyl'. Періодизація як напрямок дослідження генези та історії української мови. Мовознавство. 1997.- Ч.6.-С.3–14; 1998.
* Magocsi, Paul Robert (1996). ''A History of Ukraine.'' Toronto: University of Toronto Press. .
*
Litopys.kiev.ua
* . Ukrainian translation is partially availabl .
*
"What language is spoken in Ukraine" , in ''Welcome to Ukraine'', 2003, 1., wumag.kiev.ua
All-Ukrainian population census 2001 , ukrcensus.gov.ua
1996, rada.kiev.ua rada.kiev.ua.
1897 census , demoscope.ru
* [http://www.101languages.net/ukrainian/history.html 101languages.net – Ukrainian 101]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ukrainian Language
Ukrainian language,
Ruthenian language
Languages of Ukraine
Subject–verb–object languages
Ukrainian studies
East Slavic languages
Languages written in Cyrillic script