Ukrainian

**Ukrainian** (*українська мова* [ukrɑˈjiɲsʲkɐ ˈmɔwɐ]) is an East Slavic language closely related to Russian, Belarusian and Rusyn. It is the official language of Ukraine, and the common language of most Ukrainians. It is also one of the three official language of the largely unrecognized Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, commonly known as Transnistria. Ukrainian is written in the Cyrillic script.

A large Ukrainian minority lives in Russia and Moldova. Large diaspora communities also live in the U.S. and Canada as well as Portugal(around 60.000).

 File:Ukie.png

## History

### **Origin**

The origin of the Ukrainian language is still highly debated among scholars. But we can be sure about some aspects of its development. We know that at least from the 11 century, the language used in Novgorod differed from the Kyiv. We have by the 16 century direct written evidence of the Ukrainian language, on a dictionary named "Лексис".

Past that in the 18 century, we have the first entirely written Modern Ukrainian literary work in history, it is called "Енеїда", a burlesque poem made by Ivan Kotlyarevsky in 1798.

### **Later Period**

Later on in the Russian Empire, Ukrainian was called "Малорусскій"(Little Russian); and according to the Russian Empire 1897 Census, Ukrainian was the predominant language on what is today the entirety of Ukraine, although only 32.5% of the urban population claimed Ukrainian as their native language.

 File:Ukrainian in Russian Empire 1897.png

## Writing system

The Ukrainian language uses a modified version of the Cyrillic Alphabet. Speakers of Russian are familiar with most of the letters, but some being unique to Ukrainian.

## Features

### **General Characteristics**

Similar to its sister languages, Ukrainian is a highly inflected synthetic language. It has 7 grammatical cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental, Locative and the Vocative. The Vocative being underused by some people, but recently has been getting fairly more popular around some groups of people.

All words in Ukrainian are gendered in one of the three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. To know the gender of a word you can just look at the end of the word. Masculine nouns in general end in ь, й or a consonant, feminine ones end in а or я, and neuter ones end in е, о and some verb derived nouns ending in я(You can easily know that it is neuter just looking at the end of the word, if the preceding consonant is doubled or not, ex: Дослідження, research; neutral). All genders have their declensions for each specific grammatical case. Declining nouns for cases depends on 2 factors:

* The gender of the noun
* If it ends on a soft(ь, й, я, і) or a hard sound(и, о, е, а, consonants)

Let's see the declensions for the masculine noun чоловік(man):

* (1) The ending -а for the Genitive case in masculine nouns is only used for living beings, inanimate masculines nouns in the Genitive case take -у(hard ending) or -ю(soft ending)
* (2) The Accusative case for inanimate nouns is the same as the nominative

Now the declension of a feminine noun such as собака(dog):

* (1) In Ukrainian some sound changes are quite common in some cases, it is common for declensions in nouns that end in к, and in the declension it adds -і(a soft vowel), the к becomes a ц.

For the neuter declension we will use the noun місто(city):

## Resources

### **General Resources**

General Resources

Ukrainian has a decent amount of general resources.

 Resource
 Available

### **Pimsleur**

* Ukrainian has 1 unit, with 30 total lessons.

### **YouTube channels**

* імені Т.Г. Шевченка - Ukrainian history channels.
* Ukraїner - Videos on modern Ukraine, showing interesting places and the subcultures throughout Ukraine .
* Alex\_D20 - A Let's Play channel, with some focus on games made by Ukrainians.
* Історія Без Міфів - World and Ukrainian history channel.
* Geek Journal - A channel whose main focus is on popular culture and cinema.
* Клятий раціоналіст - Science channel.
* Цікава наука - Translation of science videos.

### **Dictionaries and Pronunciation Guide**

* Словник.ua - It is your best bet if you want a complete, and useful dictionary, although it is in Ukrainian, and the language used can be quite hard to understand for beginners.
* Cybermova - They have English-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-English dictionaries, they can be very useful, but sometimes the descriptions can be severally lacking information
* Словники України - An amazing dictionary, which shows all the declensions of each word, and also shows where the stress falls in the word, amazing for bettering pronunciation.

### **Other**

* Гуртом - A simply amazing website, where you can download films, serials, documentaries and more all in Ukrainian.