- Russian is younger than Ukrainian and comes from Ukrainian church speech (Church Slavonic) and a mixture of Tatar-Finnish.
- The oldest mention of the Ukrainian language dates back to 858, and for the first time, the Ukrainian language was equated to the level of the literary language at the end of the 18th century after the publication of the first edition of the «Eneida» in 1798, authored by Ivan Kotliarevskyi, who is considered the founder of the new Ukrainian literary language.
- According to the genealogical classification, the Ukrainian language belongs to the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic group of the Indo-European language family. The closest genealogical to the Ukrainian language is the Belarusian language.
- In terms of vocabulary, the closest to Ukrainian is the Belarusian language (84% of the general vocabulary), then Polish (70%), Slovak (68%) and Russian (62%).
- The Ukrainian language is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, and by the number of speakers, it is the 26th in the world. It is native to 37 million people and second native to another 15 million.
- The modern Ukrainian language has three main dialects: northern, southwestern and southeastern.
- According to the dictionary of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the modern Ukrainian language has around 256 thousand words, and it is included in the list of languages that are being successfully developed at present.
- The first Ukrainian ABC book (“Азбука”) was printed in 1574 in Lviv by the first printer Ivan Fedorov.
- In the Ukrainian language, there are three forms of the future tense. Simple, compound, and complex. The future tense of the first person singular of an imperfect type in Ukrainian has a different form without a prefix: «знатиму», «говоритиму», «робитиму», etc.
- Ukrainian is 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).
Why do you learn the Ukrainian language? Please write your answer in the comments below.
Author: Inna Samoilova Founder & CEO of online school “Speak Ukrainian”, Content creator, Blogger
As a child, my Grandparents and father spoke Ukrainian in the home. (My Grandparents lived with us.) It was not taught to us and they did not speak to the children in Ukrainian. I am 67 years old, and have a strong desire to got o Ukraine someday to help in the rebuilding and with humanitarian support someday. I want to visit the town where my ancestors are from and trace my ancestors. Learning Ukrainian now has become very important and meaningful to me. I feel like I am reclaiming an extremely important part of my blood heritage. Thank you.