The official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian. The Ukrainian language is also the mother tongue of Ukrainians residing in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Canada, the USA, Australia and other countries. Approximately 45 million people speak Ukrainian placing it among the twenty most widespread languages in world.
In accord with the all-Ukrainian census of 2001, 67 percent of the country’s population believes Ukrainian to be their native tongue. This figure is 2.8 percent higher than that recorded in the census of 1989. The largest minority language is Russian, with 29.6 percent of the population taking it as their first language: this figure turned out to be 3.2 percent lower than the previous count. The portion of remaining languages was 2.9 percent.
The Language Origin
Ukrainian belongs to the Indo-European linguistic family tree and forms, jointly with Russian and Belarusian, the East-Slavic group of the Slavic sub-family. While the West-Slavic group includes Slovak, Czech, Polish, Kashubian, High and Low Lusatian (Germany) and correspondingly the South-Slavic branch Slovenian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian (or Croato-Serbian) languages as well as Old Slavonic.
The history of the Ukrainian language starts with the pre-Slavic (common Slavonic) language that was shaped out of the Proto-Indo-European language around the third millennium B.C. The pre-Slavonic period lasted for close to two thousand years.
It is traditionally believed, due to czarist and then Soviet ideological directives that in the 11th to 12th centuries during the feudal fragmentation of Kyivan Rus, the so-called Old Russian language common for the entire East Slavs formed, which served as the basis for the three East-Slavic languages- Ukrainian, Russian and Byelorussian. The present-day linguistic, archeological and historical knowledge allows substantial amendments to this idea.
Today, researchers mark out the Ukrainian language immediately from the pre-Slavic and discard the intermediate links. Under this approach, Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Russian developed independently from each other.
Ukrainian inherited from the pre-Slavic the tangible lexical fund and numerous phonetic and grammatical (mainly morphologic) features that in other Slavic languages were substituted by new forms, leaving the Ukrainian language with the oldest still exisiting linguistic peculiarities.
Together with the Orthodox Christian faith, the Old Slavic (or Old Church Slavic) language, created by Cyril and Methodius, the first Slavonic culture figures in the field and based on old Bulgarian dialects arrived in Kyivan Rus. Religious and official texts were inscribed in Old Slavic.
During the 14th to 18th centuries, the old-Ukrainian vernacular was used. The 19th century marked the emergence of the modern Ukrainian as a literary language. Based on the system of parlance of the Poltava-Dnipro region, Ivan Kotliarevsky is believed to be its originator while Taras Shevchenko realized its artistic possibilities.
The Written Language
After adoption of Christianity in 988 two types of writing the language were known in Kyivan Rus: Cyrillic alphabet (named after Constantine Filosof, Cyril in monastic life), and Glagolitic letters (from old-Slavic word glagol meaning “a word”).
The Glagolitic is viewed as the older writing system, however no consensus exists as to its origin. Its alphabet consisted of 39 letters with highly complex inscription in the form of interconnected circles and loops. Despite this complexity, it was in use for quite long time in some South Slavonic countries.
The Cyrillic alphabet is the original Slavic writing system that resulted from a creative remake of the Greek alphabet that consisted of 43 letters including 24 Greek and 19 original Slavic letters with a script very close to that of Greek and Byzantium characters. From those times on such lettering became the graphic basis for modern Ukrainian, Russian, Byelorussian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian writing language systems.
The modern Ukrainian alphabet consists of 33 letters to denote 38 phonemes with 21 letters б, в, г, ґ, д, ж, з, к, л, м, н, п, р, с, т, ф, х, ц, ч, ш, щ indicating consonants sounds while 10 of them stand for vowels. Of the latter, the letters а, е, и, і, о, у represent a single sound each, while the symbols є, ю, я only if they follow soft consonant [e.g., синє (blue), люди (people), ряд (row)], and are diphthongal at the beginning of a word, followed by vowels or after apostrophe (’), that is, [y + е], [y + u], [y + a] as in має (has), юнак (a youth), в’янути (to fade); the letter ї always denotes diphthong [y + і] as in їжа (food), з’їзд (convention); the letter й reproduces consonant [y] before о as in його (his) and non-syllabic [i] in other positions, for instance, йду (I’m going), гай (wood); the letter ь indicates no sound but serves as a softening symbol as in кінь (horse), льон (flax). The letter г denotes pharyngeal [h] in голова (head), while ґ – velar plosive [g] in ґава(crow), ґрунт (soil), ґудзик (button), while the letter щ indicates combination of consonants [sch] as in щука (pike). Characters of the Ukrainian alphabet are used upper- and lower-cased in shape; the symbols may be represented as block letters as well as handwritten.
Modern Ukrainian Language
Modern Ukrainian language is inflectional; in other words, grammatical features are indicated by alternation of the word by adding affixes. The function of suffixes and prefixes is to specify the meaning of the root having the principal lexical value.
Seven cases characterize a noun; one is vocative distinguishing the Ukrainian conjugation from similar systems of other East Slavic languages. The Ukrainian verb has four tenses: in addition to the habitual past, present and future tenses, there is pluperfect, a verb tense used to express action completed before a specified or implied past time.
The principal Ukrainian vocabulary has four layers of words of Slavonic origin: common Indo-European stock of words [батько(father), матір (mother), сестра (sister), дім (house), вовк (wolf), бути (to be), жити (to live), їсти (to eat), etc]; pre-Slavic words [коса (scythe), сніп ( sheaf, жито (rye), віл (bullock), корова (cow), ловити (to catch), etc.]; properly Ukrainian words present only in this language [кисень (oxygen), водень (hydrogen), мрія (a dream), зволікати (to delay), зайвий (superfluous), байдуже (indifferently), примхи (whims), перекотиполе (tumbleweed), etc]; borrowing from other Slavic languages [розкішний (luxurious), набридати (to be bored with), нащадок (a descendant) from Byelorussian; перешкода (obstacle), недолугий (good for nothing), дощенту (utterly), обіцяти (to promise), цікавий (interesting), гасло (slogan), міць (power), шлюб (marriage), раптом (suddenly), принаймні (at least), etc. from Polish; брама (gates), огида (disgust), ярка (young sheep), паркан (fence), карк (neck), etc. from Czech; хлопець (boy) from Serbian; храм (temple), глава (chapter), владика (ruler), сотворити (to create), etc. from Bulgarian]. The rest of the vocabulary comprises the later borrowings mostly from the dead classic languages-Greek, Latin and Old Slavic. During the Soviet period, the vocabulary absorbed quite a few borrowings from Russian that were often introduced even without adaptation to the grammar rules’ requirements. Lately, the lexical composition of the language is being vigorously supplied by borrowings from English, although general development of the language occurs at the account of internal resources of it-the new words are created on the use of the basis already existing.
Useful references
Ukrainian linguistic portal
Dictionaries of Ukraine on-line
Ukrainian language education and information internet-project
Modern Ukrainian Language Textbook
Reference book on the Ukrainian language
Ukrainian Language Encyclopedia
Ukrainian Thesaurus
Ukrainian Language for Kids
The Lingual Group’s site
“For Those Eager to Learn Ukrainian”
Ukrainian Alphabet
Conversational Ukrainian - English textbook
Teach Yourself Ukrainian Complete Course (Teach Yourself Books) at amazon.com
Ukrainian Language
