Розмовляєте українською? то може вже й час!
Do you speak Ukrainian? Well, maybe it's time to learn about it now!
Speakers
Quick bitesize facts about the Ukrainian speakers...
🇺🇦 Ukrainian is native to 37 million and second native to 15 million people.
🇺🇦 Ukrainian is the first language for ≈68% of Ukrainians. ≈30% speak Russian as their first language. <3% speak Crimean Tatar, Moldovan, Hungarian, Romanian,or others.
🇺🇦 In the West of Ukraine: 95% of people consider Ukrainian to be their native language. central Ukraine: 84% Ukrainian native. South of Ukraine: 61% Ukrainian native. East of Ukraine: 42% Ukrainian native.
🇺🇦 Ukrainian is most similar to Belorusian, polish, Serbian, Slovak, Czech, Russian, and bulgarian.
🇺🇦 After centuries of persecution of Ukrainian-speakers and banning of the language by the imperial Russia and, later, the ussr, Ukrainian language dynamics are reviving.
In year 2012, before the Euromaidan, 57% of all Ukrainians considered Ukrainian their native language.
In 2022, the number has reached 76-80% and is growing.
🇺🇦 As recent data shows, Russian is not more widely spoken than Ukrainian by Ukrainians at home.
In every day communication, 51% speak Ukrainian only and 33% use both Ukrainian and Russian.
Vocabulary
The ABCs of Ukrainian...
🇺🇦 Languages Closest to Ukrainian
Language | % Similarity |
1. Belorussian | 84 |
2. Polish | 70 |
3. Slovak | 67 |
4. Russian | 62 (English and Dutch share roughly the same percentage of vocabulary) |
🇺🇦 First Ukrainian words were recorded in year 448 BCE.
🇺🇦 The first Ukrainian ABC book was printed in 1574 in Lviv by the first printer Ivan Fedorov.
🇺🇦 At the moment, modern ukrainian dictionary includes around 256,000 words (for comparison, english has 170,000 words, japanese 500,000 words).
🇺🇦 The Ukrainian alphabet consists of 33 cyrillic letters:
А Б В г Ґ д е є ж з и і ї й к л м н о п р с т у ф х ц ч ш щ ь ю я
Difficulty?
🇺🇦 East slavic language from the baltic-slavic language group
🇺🇦 Ukrainian belongs to the Indo-European language family, meaning it has shared rules and grammar with english (and other Indo-European languages).
🇺🇦 An English speaker would need about 1100 class hours or 44 weeks of practice to become fluent in Ukrainian.
How melodic is it?
🇺🇦 Ukrainian is considered one of the most beautiful languages in the world. At a language competition in Italy, it was recognized as the second-most melodic language in the world (after Italian). Ukrainian is also third-most beautiful in terms of vocabulary (after French and Persian).
Learn the language!
Try to pronounce the following
Hello!
🇺🇦 Vitayu! (accent on a, yu pronounced like "you") can be used to greet anyone of any status).
🇺🇦 Pryvit! (accent on I, y here spunds like hard e) informal, used amongst friends/relatives).
Glory to Ukraine!
🇺🇦 Slava ukrayini! (accent on the first a, accent on yi) the official salute of the ukrainian armed forces. can be used in every-day salutation).
Followed by reply: glory to the heroes!
🇺🇦 Heroyam slava! (h here pronounced as h+g, hard e, accent on ro, yam like "yum").
Thank you very much!
🇺🇦 Doozhe dyakooyu! (accent on doo, accent on dya, zh pronounced as "s" in "parisian" but hard).
Love
🇺🇦 Kohannya (accent on ha, ya pronounced together as one sound).
Attitude: Ukrainians might correct you on mistakes but we do love it when foreigners try to speak our language.
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