Translations and Other Language Solutions in Ukrainian Language

The Ukrainian language (native name: украї́нська мо́ва, romanised: ukrainska mova), historically also called Ruthenian, is a Slavic language of the Indo-European language family. It is the official language in Ukraine and one of the official languages in the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. Most Ukrainian speakers live in Ukraine. It is the second or third largest Slavic language after Russian and Polish with around 45 million Ukrainian speakers. The Ukrainian writing system uses Cyrillic. Similar languages to Ukrainian are Rusyn, which some linguists consider to be a Ukrainian dialect, Belarusian and Russian.

Standard Ukrainian is regulated by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, particularly its Institute of Ukrainian Language, Ukrainian Language Information Foundation, and Potebnia Institute of Linguistics.

The origins of the Ukrainian language can be traced to the Old East Slavic Language, which was spoken by inhabitants of Kievan Rus from the 10th to 13th centuries.

When Eastern Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire from 1804 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, it was forbidden to speak Ukrainian at schools since it was considered to be part of Russian as the Little Russian dialect (малороссийское наречие русского языка).

Whereas in Western Ukraine, which initially was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and later the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ukrainian language, called the Ruthenian language (русинська мова), was never banned and there was a more favourable environment for its development.

Ukrainian dialects are traditionally categorised into three groups: southwestern (has distinct dialect dissemination, which is related to the influence of Polish, Slovakian and Hungarian), northern (the features of the northern dialects were formed under the influence of the neighbouring Belarusian dialects) and southeast dialect, which is the basis for the modern literary language.

In the eastern and southeastern regions of Ukraine, mostly in cities (Zaporizhzhia, Donbas, Kryvyi Rih, Odesa), as well as in the Crimea, since the 17th and 18th centuries exists the so-called суржик ‘Surzhyk’ (original meaning: mix of rye, wheat, and oats) – a colloquial language that was formed by mechanically combining the phonetics of Ukrainian dialects and mostly Russian vocabulary.

The Ukrainian vocabulary is primarily made up of Slavic lexicon and the common East Slavic lexicon.

Old (Slavic, East Slavic, Ukrainian) lexicon makes up about 90% of Ukrainian vocabulary. The most significant borrowed lexicon groups are Graecisms, Latinisms, Polonisms, Russianisms, and borrowings from other languages via Russian, as well as Russian calques, borrowings from Turkish, and modern borrowings from Western European languages: German, English, French, Italian, and others.

During the seven-decade-long soviet period, Ukrainian held a formal official local language status in the Ukrainian SSR. In reality, however, it was often not the case – Ukrainians always had to compete with the Russian language, and soviet authorities had various attitudes towards Ukrainian, ranging from encouragement and tolerance to actual denial.

Ukrainian has been the official language in Ukraine since 1991, and the government implemented an administrative policy to expand the use of Ukrainian.

The Ukrainian education system was reformed from partially using Ukrainian at schools to using it fully within the first decade of independence. Gradually the use of Ukrainian in mass media and trade was expanded. There were situations when the sudden change of the study language at higher education institutions angered the Russian-speaking citizens.

In the course of time most of the population, including ethnic Russians, people of mixed ethnicity, and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, started identifying as Ukrainian citizens.

The use of Ukrainian is growing after a long period of decline. Even though there are almost fifty million ethnic Ukrainians in the whole world, including 37.5 million in Ukraine (77.8% of the population), Ukrainian is most common in western and central Ukraine. Both Ukrainian and Russian are spoken in Kyiv, which is a noticeable difference from recent history when Russian was most commonly spoken in the city. It is considered that these changes were largely caused by an influx of immigrants from Ukraine’s western regions, as well as a handful of Kyivan citizens that chose to speak the language they speak at home in public places. Public advertisements and announcements in Kyiv were put out in Ukrainian. Russian is the most common language in most cities and towns of south and east Ukraine.

On 25 April 2019, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passed the law on the obligatory use of Ukrainian in state and local authority institutes.

Ukraine is putting in an effort to decrease the influence of Russian in the country. The main goal of the passed law is to completely secure the use of Ukrainian in the public sphere. From now on, businesses are required to provide information about their products and services in Ukrainian. The discussions of politicians were heated and opinions were radically opposite. The law stated that the following professionals shall speak Ukrainian fluently: politicians, including the president, teachers, medical staff, lawyers, and notaries. Ukrainian is required to be used almost everywhere: in television and radio, the press, sports events, advertisements, and political party activities. The law does not apply to the sphere of private communication and religious ceremonies. Knowledge of the Ukrainian language is a requirement for acquiring citizenship.

In Western Ukraine, where the Russian language is hardly heard, answering in Ukrainian to a question spoken in Russian is an age-old practice, that has not changed significantly since 1993, when this region got annexed by the Soviet Union after its invasion of Poland.

Based on the results of a language competition that took place in Paris in 1934, Ukrainian is the third most beautiful language after French and Persian in terms of phonetics, vocabulary, phraseology, and sentence structure. Additionally, it is officially the second most melodic language in the world after Italian. Therefore, it is not surprising that many admit to noticing a resemblance between Ukrainian and bird songs.

In order to make sure it is true, one should listen to George Gershwins’s world-famous Summertime in its original language, which is… Ukrainian! Summertime was inspired by the old Ukrainian lullaby Oi Hodyt’ Son Kolo Vikon.

Ukrainian has a unique alphabet that has two letters not found in any other language: ґ and ї.

There are seven UNESCO World Heritage sites in the country, including the Saint-Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, the Ancient City of Tauric Chersonese, and the Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians.

Ukrainian citizens are bilingual, speaking both Russian and Ukrainian.

Ukrainians are proud of their beautiful language. If you speak to them in Russian, they will most likely answer you in Ukrainian.

Those who love McDonald’s would find it interesting that the McDonald’s restaurant in Kyiv’s biggest railway station is the third most visited in the world. Arsenalna metro station in Kyiv is known as the deepest metro station in the world (105.5 meters underground).

Around 45 million people speak the Ukrainian language. Ukrainian is the only official language in Ukraine, and it is one of the three official languages in the unrecognised Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic as well.

It has the recognised minority or regional language status in Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ukrainian also has certain official functions on a regional level in the United States of America and Poland.

The Ukrainian diaspora is the third largest Ukrainian community in the world after Ukraine and Russia and the fifth largest ethnic group in Canada. Canada has more than a million people who one way or another identify themselves with the Ukrainian ethnos. During the first two immigration waves, immigrants spoke in modern Western Ukrainian dialects, but over time Canadian Ukrainian developed differently from Western Ukrainian dialects due to the long distance and influence of English. At the moment, the number of Ukrainian speakers in Canada is decreasing but there are Ukrainian schools and opportunities to learn Ukrainian at universities in Canada. The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (Канадський iнститут українських студiй), established in 1976, publishes scientific literature and runs projects in the field of Ukrainian language studies, for example, the Journal of Ukrainian Studies or the Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Енциклопедія українознавства).

Poland has the second largest Ukrainian diaspora of 1.2 million people, followed by the USA with 1 million and then Brazil, Argentina, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Germany, Czechia, Romania, Portugal, and Latvia.