Ukrainian language

• 1. Introduction

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  Ukrainian, or "ukrainska mova" as its speakers call it, carries within its sounds a thousand years of survival against extraordinary pressure. It is an East Slavic language spoken primarily in Ukraine, the native tongue of a large majority of Ukrainians, and a language that has been banned, suppressed, mocked as a peasant dialect, and declared nonexistent by government decree. Yet here it stands. The tsarist interior minister Pyotr Valuyev famously proclaimed in 1863 that "there never has been, is not, and never can be a separate Little Russian language." That single sentence captures the entire political drama Ukrainian has lived through. How did this language survive empires that tried to erase it? What makes it distinctly Ukrainian rather than simply a variant of Russian? And how does a language outlast the states that tried to kill it? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Roots and Divergence

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  Around the 12th and 13th centuries, while the medieval state of Kievan Rus still stood, something began shifting inside the sounds of Old East Slavic. Mid vowels were lengthening and raising in specific phonological conditions, producing results that would not appear in Russian at all. The Old East Slavic word for cat, "kot," became the Ukrainian "kit." The word for oven, "pech," became "pich." These were not small accidents. They were systematic changes that set Ukrainian on its own path.

  Linguists debate exactly when that divergence began. Ahatanhel Krymsky and Aleksey Shakhmatov placed the split of Eastern Slavic dialects in the 8th or early 9th century. Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak, writing in 2012, argued that the Novgorod dialect differed markedly from other Kievan Rus dialects during the 11th and 12th centuries, and that modern Russian descended from the fusion of that Novgorod speech with the common Kievan dialect, while Ukrainian and Belarusian developed from dialects that were already close to each other. Ukrainian linguist Stepan Smal-Stotsky went further, denying that a unified Old East Slavic language ever existed at all, arguing instead that Ukrainian coalesced from the gradual convergence of tribal dialects dating back to the 6th through 9th centuries.

  The language also absorbed traces of peoples who had lived around it for centuries. The voiced fricative sound rendered as the letter "h" in modern Ukrainian, a sound absent from standard Russian, is thought by some researchers to have entered Eastern Slavic from Scythian and related Iranian dialects spoken north of the Black Sea during the early Middle Ages. During the 13th century, when German settlers arrived at the invitation of Ruthenian princes, words tied to trade and craft entered the language, including "rynok" for market and "majster" for craftsman. Yiddish-speaking communities deepened that influence further under Polish rule.

• 3. Under Poland and Lithuania

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  In the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania gradually absorbed most of present-day Ukraine. Old East Slavic became the language of the chancellery, known as Chancery Slavonic, and slowly evolved into what historians call Ruthenian. That language was the original tongue of the Statutes of Lithuania in 1529, 1566, and 1588, documents that were only later translated into Latin and then Polish.

  The 1569 Union of Lublin shifted much of Ukrainian territory from Lithuanian to Polish administration, bringing a harder assimilationist pressure. Ukrainian nobles who wanted to retain their aristocratic standing learned Polish and converted to Catholicism. The lower classes were less touched, partly because literacy at the time was concentrated among the upper class and clergy. But educational institutions fell one by one to Polonization.

  Even so, Ukrainian culture did not simply wither. The Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium, founded by the Orthodox Metropolitan Peter Mogila and the predecessor of the modern Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, became the most important center of learning of its era. Language at that time mapped onto religion: Catholics spoke Polish, Orthodox worshippers spoke Ruthenian. The lexicon published by Pamvo Berynda in that period documents how strongly Church Slavonic and the common spoken language of Ukraine were shaping each other.

  By the mid-17th century, the linguistic gap between Ukrainian and Russian had grown wide enough that Bohdan Khmelnytsky, head of the Zaporozhian Host, needed translators during negotiations for the Treaty of Pereyaslav with the Russian state. Khmelnytsky reportedly had letters written in "Muscovite dialect" translated into Latin so he could read them. This was not a distant or symbolic divergence. It was a practical barrier between neighbors.

• 4. Suppression and Survival

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  The 1654 Pereiaslav Agreement divided Ukraine between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Tsardom of Russia. Over the following century, both powers grew increasingly hostile to Ukrainian cultural and political life. Russia adopted the name "Little Russia" for Ukraine and "Little Russian" for the language, a term with Byzantine roots that may originally have meant "old" or "fundamental" Russia. The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was taken over by the Russian Empire.

  In 1804, Ukrainian was banned as both a subject and a language of instruction in Russian Imperial schools. By 1817 the Synod had issued a decree to close the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 1847 the Brotherhood of Sts Cyril and Methodius, a cultural organization that had embraced the word "Ukraine" as a self-appellation for the nation, was terminated. That same year, poet Taras Shevchenko was arrested, exiled for ten years, and banned from writing and painting for political reasons. In 1862 the cultural organizer Pavlo Chubynsky was exiled for seven years to Arkhangelsk. The Ukrainian magazine Osnova was shut down.

  Alexander II then issued his secret Ems Ukaz, which prohibited publication and importation of most Ukrainian-language books, banned public performances and lectures in Ukrainian, and even barred the printing of Ukrainian text accompanying musical scores. A brief relaxation after 1905 was followed by yet another strict ban in 1914.

  Through all of this, western Ukraine proved a crucial refuge. Under the more liberal Austrian Habsburg rule in Galicia, Ukrainian had a degree of official status from 1849 onward. Laws were published in Ruthenian. Street signs in Lviv were required by 1849 to include Ruthenian versions. After the 1860s, the majority of Ukrainian literary works were published in Austrian Galicia and smuggled eastward. The western region, which had largely escaped the artificial famine, the Great Purge, and most of Stalinism, would carry the language's strongest flame into the independence era.

• 5. The Soviet Decades

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  In the Russian Empire Census of 1897, Ukrainian was the second most spoken language in the entire empire, with over 22 million speakers. Yet that same census showed that in Odesa, then the largest city in what is now Ukraine, only 5.6 percent of the population claimed Ukrainian as their native language. The urban-rural split was stark: in rural Ukrainian provinces roughly 80 percent of inhabitants named Ukrainian as their native tongue; in cities only 32.5 percent did. In Kyiv, the share of Ukrainian speakers actually declined from 30.3 percent in 1874 to 16.6 percent by 1917.

  The Soviet era held out a brief promise. The 1920s policy of Ukrainization actively promoted the language, and a unified Ukrainian alphabet was officially established at a 1927 international Orthographic Conference in Kharkiv. But the reversal came swiftly. In 1933, a spelling commission headed by Andrii Khvylia branded the 1928 orthography as "nationalist" and produced a revised spelling, in just five months, designed to bring Ukrainian and Russian closer together. The letter "ge" (the sound that distinguishes Ukrainian from Russian) was removed from the alphabet entirely and would not be restored until the period of Glasnost in 1990.

  The Communist Party leader Petro Shelest, in power from 1963 to 1972, promoted Ukrainian and developed plans to expand its role in higher education. He was removed for being too lenient on Ukrainian nationalism after only a brief tenure. His successor, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who led the party from 1972 to 1989, significantly reduced the language's public presence and shifted toward speaking Russian in official settings himself.

  Parents were generally free to choose the language of their children's schooling, and many chose Russian because career advancement required it. The share of students in Russian-language schools in Ukraine rose from 14 percent in 1939 to more than 30 percent by 1962. By the eve of independence, Donetsk had no Ukrainian-language schools at all, and in Kyiv only a quarter of children attended Ukrainian-language schools.

• 6. Independence and the Literary Tradition

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  Since 1991, Ukrainian has been the official state language of Ukraine. The 2001 census recorded that 67.5 percent of the country's population named Ukrainian as their native language, up 2.8 percentage points from 1989, while the share naming Russian fell by 3.2 percentage points. By 2019, a survey found that 85 percent of respondents in Ukraine said they spoke Ukrainian, or Ukrainian and Russian, at home. In August 2022 that figure had reached 51 percent speaking only Ukrainian, compared with 44 percent in February 2014. In 2019, the parliament passed a law formalizing rules governing the use of Ukrainian as the state language and introducing penalties for violations.

  The literary tradition that anchored all of this dates to 1798, when Ivan Kotlyarevsky, a playwright from Poltava in southeastern Ukraine, published his epic poem "Eneyida," a burlesque retelling of Virgil's Aeneid in vernacular Ukrainian. He wrote it in a satirical register partly to avoid censorship, and it became the earliest known Ukrainian published book to survive through both Imperial and Soviet policies. Kotlyarevsky's southeastern dialect, spoken across the Poltava, Kharkiv, and southern Kyiv regions, became the foundation on which Taras Shevchenko and the editor Panteleimon Kulish built the modern Ukrainian literary standard in the mid-19th century.

  The philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda, and later writers including Mykola Kostomarov, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka, extended that literary tradition outward. After the 1860s, Galician influences shaped the literary vocabulary, particularly in areas of law, government, technology, and science, because Ukrainian writers from the Russian Empire relocated to Austria's more permissive territory. Borys Hrinchenko's four-volume Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language, published between 1907 and 1909, became the unofficial spelling standard for Ukrainian writers and publications for more than a decade, until the Central Rada issued the first official orthography on the 17th of January 1918. The Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language in its current form spans 11 volumes and contains 253,000 entries.

• 7. A Language Unlike Its Neighbors

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  Ukrainian is not simply Russian with different pronunciation. It is a distinct fusional language with seven grammatical cases, two numbers for nouns, and verb conjugations across four tenses, two voices, and three persons. Crucially, unlike all other Slavic languages, Ukrainian has developed a synthetic future tense through the gradual erosion of the verb meaning "to have" or "to take," producing forms like "pysat-ymu" for "I will write." Ukrainian linguist A. Danylenko argues that the auxiliary here should be read as "to take" rather than "to have," a pattern analogous to constructions found in Chinese and Hungarian.

  Ukrainian has also preserved features that Russian abandoned. Like most Slavic languages except Russian, Belarusian, standard written Slovak, and Slovene, Ukrainian retains the Common Slavic vocative case: when addressing a sister, a speaker says "sestro" rather than the nominative form. Ukrainian, along with Serbo-Croatian and Slovene, has developed the ending "-mo" for first-person plural verbs, as in "khodymo" for "we walk."

  The language's written form uses 33 letters in a version of Cyrillic representing 38 phonemes, plus an apostrophe. The Ukrainian orthography is phonemic in principle, with one letter generally corresponding to one phoneme. The letter "ge" represents a voiced glottal fricative absent from standard Russian, and the letter representing Cyrillic v/w often denotes a /w/ sound in Ukrainian dialects rather than the /v/ of Russian. False cognates between Ukrainian and Russian are numerous enough to have generated their own phenomenon, Surzhyk, a mixed register where speakers inadvertently shift between the two languages. Ukraine marks the Day of Ukrainian Writing and Language on the 9th of November, the Eastern Orthodox feast day of Nestor the Chronicler.