Written by Miranda González
Few languages are as politically charged as Ukrainian. While it has 36 million speakers worldwide (32 million in Ukraine), its proponents have had to fight to keep it from becoming linguistically oppressed and eclipsed by Russian, especially because Ukraine only gained its independence in 1991. The Ukrainian language has been banned scores of times over the past four centuries, as noted in chronologies such as this one. However, the language is still very much alive and well and has been experiencing growth and gaining prominence in recent years.
Bilingual Ukrainians
Ukrainian is the only official language of Ukraine, but it’s important to note that most Ukrainians are bilingual in Russian and Ukrainian, and much of the print media in the country is distributed in Russian. The most recent polls show that about 68 percent of Ukrainians identify Ukrainian as their native language, while around 30 percent of Ukrainians say that Russian is their mother tongue. Native speakers of Ukrainian are heavily concentrated in western Ukraine, which was never part of the Russian Empire. The prevalence of native speakers of Russian increases the farther east and south you go within Ukraine.
So how close is Ukrainian to Russian?
Ukrainian and Russian are both Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet. They share 62 percent of the same vocabulary. (For reference, compare Spanish and Portuguese, which have 89 percent lexical similarity.) However, the language that’s closest to Ukrainian is actually Belarusian; these two languages share 84 percent of the same vocabulary. Ukrainian is even closer to Polish than to Russian as Polish and Ukrainian share 70 percent of the same vocabulary, but this similarity is only in the spoken form since Polish is written using the Roman alphabet.
A language or a dialect?
Speakers of Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian can all understand each other to a certain degree while still speaking their respective languages, much like Spanish speakers and Portuguese speakers can. At one point it was argued that Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian were simply dialects of the same tongue. This claim, considered to be politically motivated in favor of the Russian Empire, was later dismissed, and modern linguists identify them as three separate languages that evolved from Old East Slavic.
Ukrainian is making a comeback
Sparked by Ukraine’s independence and encouraged by political and educational initiatives, the use of Ukrainian has markedly increased. The number of native speakers of Ukrainian grew 3 percent between 1989 and 2001. Increased use of Ukrainian can also be attributed to the movement of Ukrainians from rural areas (where the Ukrainian language is more widely used) to urban areas (where Russian has been more predominant). The future is bright for Ukrainian!
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