Introduction to Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. The Ukrainian language traces its origins to the Old Slavic language of the early medieval state of Kievan Rus'. In its earlier stages it was known as Ruthenian. Ukrainian is a lineal descendant of the colloquial language used in Kievan Rus (10th–13th century).
A Ukrainophone is somebody who speaks the Ukrainian language. In the modern nation of Ukraine almost everybody can speak Ukrainian. Many people are fluent in Russian as well. Therefore the nation is sometimes divided into Ukrainophones and Russophones. In English these terms are used to indicate a person's language usage but not their ethnicity.
Ukrainian is the official language of Ukraine. The language is also one of three official languages of the breakaway Moldovan republic of Transnistria. Ukrainian is also co-official, alongside Romanian, in ten communes in Suceava County, Romania (as well as Bistra in Maramureş County). In these localities, Ukrainians, who are an officially recognized ethnic minority in Romania, make up more than 20% of the population. Thus, according to Romania's minority rights law, education, signage and access to public administration and the justice system are provided in Ukrainian, alongside Romanian.
Ukrainian is spoken by approximately 36,894,000 people in the world. Most of the countries where it is spoken are ex-USSR where many Ukrainians have migrated. Canada and the United States are also home to a large Ukrainian population.
The Ukrainian language is currently emerging from a long period of decline. Although there are almost fifty million ethnic Ukrainians worldwide, including 37.5 million in Ukraine (77.8% of the total population), only in western Ukraine is the Ukrainian language prevalent. In Kiev, both Ukrainian and Russian are spoken, a notable shift from the recent past when the city was primarily Russian speaking. The shift is caused, largely, by an influx of the rural population and migrants from the western regions of Ukraine but also by some Kievans' turning to use the language they speak at home more widely in everyday matters. In southern and eastern Ukraine, Russian is the language of the urban population. According to the Ukrainian Census of 2001, 87,8% people living in Ukraine are able to communicate in Ukrainian.
Use of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine can be expected to increase; as the rural population (still overwhelmingly Ukrainophone) migrates into the cities and the Ukrainian language enters into wider use in central Ukraine. However, the situation in eastern and southern Ukraine is not changing a lot, the rural Ukrainophones continue switching to Russian. The literary tradition of Ukrainian is also developing rapidly overcoming the consequences of the long period when its development was hindered by either direct suppression or simply the lack of the state encouragement policies.
The alphabet of the Ukrainian language consists of 33 letters and is derived from the Cyrillic writing system. The modern Ukrainian alphabet is the result of a number of proposed alphabetic reforms from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Ukraine under the Russian Empire, in Austrian Galicia, and later in Soviet Ukraine. A unified Ukrainian alphabet (the Skrypnykivka, after Mykola Skrypnyk) was officially established at a 1927 international Orthographic Conference in Kharkiv, during the period of Ukrainization in Soviet Ukraine. But the policy was reversed in the 1930s, and the Soviet Ukrainian orthography diverged from that used by the diaspora.
| The Ukrainian alphabet |
| А а | Б б | В в | Г г | Ґґ | Д д | Е е | Єє | Ж ж | З з | И и |
| Іі | Її | Й й | К к | Л л | М м | Н н | О о | П п | Р р | С с |
| Т т | У у | Ф ф | Х х | Ц ц | Ч ч | Ш ш | Щ щ | Ь ь | Ю ю | Я я |
