Ukrainian 
"welcome"
"welcome" 
Introduction
Ukrainian belongs to the East Slavic group of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Its closest relatives are Belarusan and Russian. According to Ethnologue, there are 31 
million speakers of Ukrainian in Ukraine with another 8 or more million in Russia and in the former republics of the Soviet Union, as well as in Eastern Europe, U.S., Canada, and Latin America.
Prior to the 14th century, ancestors of the modern Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians spoke varieties of Old East Slavic -- a language that was common to all three. Linguists think that it split into what are now Ukrainian, Belarusan, and Russian at the end of the 14th century.
Before the 18th century, the precursor of the modern literary Ukrainian language was a spoken language that existing 
side-by-side with a literary language based on Church Slavonic, a language that was quite different from the spoken one. The end of the18th century saw the publication of the first literary works written in a language based on spoken Ukrainian. This ushered in a new era in the development of the Ukrainian literary language.
After the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century by Prussia, Habsburg Austria, and Russia, Western Ukraine (Galicia) was taken over by Austria, while the rest of Ukraine was progressively incorporated into the Russian Empire. The Tsarist government of Russia did not encourage the development of Ukrainian as a separate language. Ukraine was referred to as Little Russia, and the language was called Little Russian. Publications in Ukrainian were forbidden. Widespread use of Ukrainian as a written language and in education dates only from after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the Ukrainian SSR in 1922.
Today, Ukrainian is the official language of the Republic of Ukraine. Approximately 83% of its 47.5 million inhabitants speak Ukrainian as their first language. During the seventy years of Soviet rule, the Ukrainian language was the primary spoken language in the Ukrainian SSR. However, it always had to compete with Russian, and the attitudes of the Soviet leadership towards its use ranged from tolerance to suppression.
In northern and central Ukraine, Russian is the language of the urban population, while in rural areas, Ukrainian is much more common. In the south and the east of Ukraine, Russian is prevalent even in rural areas, and in Crimea, Ukrainian is almost absent. In Kiev, both Russian and Ukrainian are spoken today, a shift from the recent past when the city was primarily Russian-speaking.
Since 1991, Ukraine has taken several steps towards solidifying the status of Ukrainian. The educational system has been transformed from one that was partly Ukrainian to one that is predominantly so. Russian still dominates the print media in most of Ukraine. The state-controlled broadcast media became exclusively Ukrainian but its poor quality makes it unpopular. There are also many obstacles to limiting the use of Russian in government administration and commerce.
Surzhyk ( суржик) literally "multigrain flour or bread" is a mixed language spoken by 15-20% of the population of Ukraine. It combines Ukrainian grammar and pronunciation with a predominantly Russian vocabulary.
Dialects |
Some linguists divide Ukrainian into three geographical dialects which differ mostly in pronunciation and vocabulary but are mutually intelligible.
Ukrainian is also spoken by large emigré groups in Canada, the U.S., Argentina, and Brazil. The first wave of these emigrés came primarily from Galicia which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War One, and then belonged to Poland between the two World Wars. These communities speak the Galician dialect of Ukrainian which shows less influence of Russian than modern Ukrainian and which has many loanwords from the local languages, e.g., English in Canada and the U.S., Spanish in Argentina, and Portuguese in Brazil. |
Structure
Sound System
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Vowels Consonants
Stress
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Like other Slavic languages, Ukrainian is richly inflected. Nouns
Adjectives Verbs
Ukrainian verbs agree with their subjects in person, number, and gender (in the past). Ukrainian verb aspect is very similar to that of Russian. Like Russian, Ukrainian perfective verbs are formed mostly by prefixation. The aspectual system is complex enough to have occupied and frustrated generations of linguists and learners. Verbs of motion constitute a special subcategory of Ukrainian verbs. These verbs are characterized by a complex system of directional and aspectual prefixes and suffixes. Word order
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Like Russian, Ukrainian has borrowed words from languages it had come into contact with over the course of its history. Among them are Old Church Slavonic, Greek, Latin, Polish, Lithuanian, French, German, Russian, and English. However, its basic vocabulary is inherently Slavic. Below are some common phrases and words in Ukrainian. 
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Writing  Modern Ukrainian is written with an adapted version of the Cyrillic alphabet which consists of 33 letters. With a few exceptions, it is very similar to the Russian alphabet. It underwent several reforms in the 19th and early 20th centuries and was officially approved in 1927. Curiously, the letter Ґ which represents the sound  was banned from 1933 until 1990. The modern Ukrainian alphabet has the following letters given below in their printed form. The longhand, or cursive, form for some letters is quite different (as is the case in Russian).  * the sound has no equivalent in English; can be approximated by pronouncing a voiced /h/; Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Ukrainian and Russian. Do you see any differences in the orthographies of the two languages?  |
Resources |
Resources for the study of Ukrainian language and culture Click here to find out where Ukrainian is taught in the United States. Library of Congress Portals to the World: Ukraine |
Interesting Facts
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Taras Shevchenko  Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) was a Ukrainian poet and artist whose literary heritade laid the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and the literary Ukrainian language. His best-known book of poetry is called Kobzar  . He is considered to be the national hero of Ukraine. Ukrainians erected many monuments to Shevchenko throughout Ukraine, Canada, and the US. One of these monuments stands in Washington, DC at 23rd and P Streets, NW.
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 | How difficult is it to learn Ukrainian? Ukrainian is considered to be a Category II language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English. |
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