Hi everyone, my name is Julie and today we're traveling to the country that
we're seeing a lot in the news recently. Ukraine
The language of this country has become the symbol of identity and the reason to fight for or against
Here I'm not going to talk about the current events but I'll try to explain the history
and the specificity of the language of these lands
Pryvit and welcome to the Ukrainian language
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Ukrainian language is an East Slavic language spoken mostly in Ukraine where it is also the official language
Ukrainian speakers also live outside Ukraine in Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus
and in many European and North American countries
There are in total around 40 million Ukrainian native speakers and currently it's hard to say which country they live in exactly
because of the 10 million Ukrainian refugees
In Ukraine the language is native for the 67.5 percent of its almost 45 million population according to the 2001 census
That is obviously slightly outdated and the numbers could have changed especially because of the situation
These days so many people switch to speaking Ukrainian at home instead of another East Slavic language
I guess in that story one simply cannot avoid politics and it's not like I'm running away from it
So let's see how Ukrainian came to be and why today the question of language became so political
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Ukrainian language history starts long before Ukraine when there was Indo-European language
Around 6 000 years ago these Indo-Europeans were hanging around and according to some theories they were actually
hanging around somewhere in Ukraine
So it's a sort of a cradle of Indo-Europeans
according to some theories
Slowly the Indo-Europeans started to disperse and their languages split into different language families
One of them Slavic
These Slavs were still hanging around modern day Ukraine for a couple of thousand years until around 500 A.D some of them
migrated South and West forming the South and West Slavic branches
The remaining became East Slavs and they spoke dialects of the same Eastern Slavic language
In the 9th century these East Slavs were conquered by the Vikings who went by the name Rus
and who established Kievan Rus
Soon the Slavic people living in this country started to identify as Rus themselves
and they spoke the ancient East Slavic language which they called "ruskiy"
The language of course had its dialects but still could easily be understood by the population all around this Kievan Rus country
In the 10th century the country converted to Orthodox Christianity and the language of writing and instruction became
the Old Church Slavonic – a language based on South Slavic dialects to which the Bible got translated
This language of course impacted the Old East Slavic language by bringing new vocabulary and of course
by bringing the Cyrillic writing system
We find birch bark manuscripts from this period where simple people send notes to their neighbors or things like that
which shows how literate the common people were at this time
Old East Slavic really started to diverge when foreign forces came in
The eastern part of Rus became part of the Mongolian Empire
while the western part joined the grand duchy of Lithuania
which elected the West East Slavic dialect – the ancestor of modern Ukrainian and Belarusian –
as the official language
This language was still called "ruska mova" by the locals back then
When the Great Dutchy of Lithuania united was Poland the official language of this huge country became Polish
This is when the future Ukrainian and Belarusian got a strong Polish influence and Incorporated many Polish words
Some researchers say that today Ukrainian vocabulary corresponds to Russian only in 60 percent
and has more common vocabulary with Polish
That is because of that period within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Progressively the territory of Ukraine got incorporated into the Russian Empire
After 400 years of separation between the two East Slavic branches
Russian and Ukrainian have already become two separate languages
However the politics of Russia in that period didn't recognize Ukrainian as a separate language
but merely as a dialect of Russian
Naturally, during the Russian rule, a lot of Russian words entered Ukrainian vocabulary
From the second half of the 19th century the policy towards Ukrainian became extremely oppressive
Ukrainian identity was not recognized as a thing
and it was forbidden to publish anything in Ukrainian language except for literally works
This was also the period when the poet Taras Shevchenko lived and worked
He is possibly the most famous Ukrainian poet and he is considered to have formed the Ukrainian literary language
Then the Soviet Union came and first it took a completely different stand on Ukrainian language
Soviets started the politics of ukrainisation in Ukraine Soviet Republic
and encouraged the usage of Ukrainian in all public spheres
However this approach ended and got completely reversed in 1937
Russian language was once again given priority until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991
This is why today language is such a painful topic
the memory of language oppression is still alive
So that's how the three languages came to be
from one East Slavic root they slowly diverged and became something else
But what's interesting is that they all used to call themselves "Rus" and some of them still do
"Belarus", "Russia", "Rusyn" – a small language closely related to Ukrainian spoken in the Carpathians
But where does the name Ukraine come from and when did the Ukrainians start to call themselves like that?
The word "ukraina" first appears in the 12th century
In the old manuscripts, it means something like "the lands around a city" or "a land around a certain centre"
For a long time, this word was used to describe the lands anywhere not only in Ukraine
We find examples of "Polish ukraina", "German ukraina", "Tatar ukraina"
But by the end of the 16th century the word "Ukraina" already designated a specific area –
the lands around the Dniepr River
Only during the 19th century, the name Ukraine shifted from an area to the name of the people who lived there
That's about the history now let's talk about the pronunciation
Historically (and now again touching on history) the Old East Slavic had a rule
where each syllable had to end with a vowel
Ukrainian preserved this rule the most that's why it is sometimes considered to be the most musical Slavic language
Ukrainian has six vowel sounds – i, u, y, e, o, a – but ten vowel letters
these four correspond to sounds ya, ye, yu, yi
Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet and most of the letters would be recognizable for anyone familiar with it
The Ukrainian specificity could be the sound "ɦ" written with this letter
while this one corresponds to the "g" sound and is encountered quite rarely mostly in loanwords
Oh and this letter stands for the combination of the sounds "shch"
The grammar of Ukrainian is pretty standard for a Slavic language meaning it is very complicated
It's an SVO language but the word order is free so it can be pretty much anything and still make sense
This is allowed by the fact that everything is declined and conjugated in Ukrainian
There are three genders and seven cases
There are four declinations meaning four ways to change cases depending on the ending of a word
and the gender and don't forget that adjectives pronouns numerals pretty much everything declines together with the noun
For example, this phrase "moyi troye naykrashchyx druziv" – "my three best friends"
in instrumental case becomes "z moyimy tryoma naykrashchymy druzyamy" – "with my three best friends"
So you see that literally every single word changed here
With verbs it doesn't become any easier – these are conjugated by person, number and tense
To finish this story let's hear some Ukrainian spoken by the native speakers
and I also hope for the bright future for the Ukrainian people
and all the people in the world and I wish that we all live in peace
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