Ukrainian

A separate East Slavic language with its own letters, its own vocative and a spelling closer to its own speech than Russian's is.

What sets it apart

• It has letters Russian does not: ї, є, ґ and an і that Russian dropped.
• It kept the vocative case for addressing people, which Russian lost.
• Its vocabulary shares more with Polish and Belarusian than its reputation suggests, and less with Russian than outsiders assume.
• It has been banned or restricted in print more than once under imperial and Soviet rule, most sharply in the nineteenth century.
• The letter г is a soft breathy sound, not the hard g of Russian, which is the fastest way to hear the difference.

What it opens

The second largest Slavic language, with a vowel music its neighbours lack, and forty million people newly deliberate about speaking it. History is being written in it right now. A nation rebuilding in real time, a music scene from Okean Elzy to Kalush, and gratitude that is impossible to overstate when foreigners learn it now.

Words with no translation

All the untranslatable words →

Next to its neighbours

Where Ukrainian parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.

Ukrainian vs Russian → Ukrainian vs Polish → Ukrainian vs Czech →

Ukrainian in the archive, next to the other sixty-six →