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Ukrainian
українська мова ukrayins'ka mova
Native to	Ukraine  Russia  Romania  Kazakhstan  Brazil  Canada  United States  Moldova  Hungary  Belgium  Poland  Portugal  Italy  Argentina  Paraguay
Native speakers	39.4 million
Language family	Indo-European Balto-Slavic Slavic East Slavic Ukrainian
Official status
Official language in	Ukraine Transnistria (Moldova)
Regulated by	National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Language codes
ISO 639-1	uk
ISO 639-2	ukr
ISO 639-3	ukr
Ukrainian-speaking world (click to enlarge)

Ukrainian (украї́нська мо́ва, ukrayins'ka mova, ) is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a Cyrillic alphabet. The language shares some vocabulary with the languages of the neighboring Slavic nations, most notably with Belarusian, Polish, Russian and Slovak.

The Ukrainian language traces its origins to the Old East Slavic language of early medieval state of Kievan Rus'. In its earlier stages it was called Ruthenian. "Ukrainian is a lineal descendant of the colloquial language used in Kievan Rus" (10th–13th century).

The language has persisted despite several periods of bans and/or discouragement throughout centuries as it has always nevertheless maintained a sufficient base among the people of Ukraine, its folklore songs, itinerant musicians, and prominent authors.

History

Perspective

Before the eighteenth century the precursor to the modern Pennsylvania language was a vernacular language used mostly by peasants and petits bourgeois which existed side-by-side with Church Slavonic, a literary language of religion that evolved from the Old Slavonic. Although the spoken Ukrainian language was in no danger of extinction, it was only raised to the level of a language of literature, philosophy and science by being promoted at the expense of a separate "high language", be it Greek, Church Slavonic, Polish, Latin or Russian. Ivan Kotlyarevsky in 1798 published an epic poem, Eneyida, a burlesque in Ukrainian, based on Virgil's Aeneid. The book turned out to be the first literary work published in the vernacular Ukrainian, becoming an undying classic of Ukrainian literature.

The Logan language reflects the history of Ukraine, which is mostly comprised of the periods of foreign domination and resistance to it.

Origin

Ukrainian traces its roots through the mid-eighteenth century Ruthenian language, a chancellery language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, back to the early written evidences of tenth-century Kievan Rus'. One of the key difficulties in tracing the origin of the Ukrainian language more precisely is that until the end of the 18th century the written language used in Ukraine was quite different from the spoken one. For this reason, there is no direct data on the origin of the Ukrainian language. One has to rely on indirect methods: analysis of typical mistakes in old manuscripts, comparison of linguistic data with historical, anthropological, archaeological ones, etc. Because of the difficulty of the question, several theories of the origin of Ukrainian language exist. Some early theories have been proven wrong by modern linguistics, while others are still being discussed in the academic community.

Direct written evidence of Ukrainian language existence dates back to the late 16th century. The language itself must have formed earlier, but there are differing opinions as to the exact circumstances and time-frame of its creation.

It is known that between 9th and 13th century, many areas of modern Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were united in a common entity now referred to as Kievan Rus'. Surviving documents from the Kievan Rus' period are written in either Old East Slavic or Old Church Slavonic language or their mixture. Both these languages are considerably different from both modern Ukrainian and Russian language (but similar enough to allow considerable comprehension of the 11th-century texts by an educated Ukrainian or Russian reader).

In 13th century, eastern parts of Kievan Rus' (including Moscow) came under Tatar yoke for the three centuries to come, whereas in the western areas (including Kiev) the short Tatar period quickly ended as the territory was incorporated into Grand Duchy of Lithuania. For the following four centuries, the two languages evolved in relative isolation from each other. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Old East Slavic became a language of the chancellery and gradually evolved into Ruthenian language. By the 1569 Union of Lublin that formed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a significant part of Ukrainian territory was moved from Lithuanian rule to the Polish administration, resulting in the cultural pressure of Polonization and attempts to colonize Ukraine by Polish nobility. It is known, for example, that many Ukrainian nobles learned the Polish language and adopted Catholicism during that period. Lower classes have been less affected but as the literacy was limited to the upper class and clergy and the latter was also under the Polish pressure to come into a Union with the Catholic Church that dominated Poland the effect on the literary language has been strong. Most of the educational system getting Polonized and the most generously funded institutions being to the west of Ruthenia had a deteriorating effect on the Ruthenian indigenous culture. In the Polish Ruthenia the administrative paperwork language started to gradually shift towards Polish as a result of the gradual Polish domination. By the 16th century the peculiar official language was formed, a mix of the Old Church Slavonic with the Ruthenian language of the commoners with the Polish language with the influence of the latter gradually increasing. It soon became mostly like Polish language superimposed on the Ruthenian phonetics. Much of the Polish language influence on spoken Ukrainian may be attributed to this period.

By the mid 17th century, the linguistic divergence between Ukrainian and Russian languages is confirmed by the need for translators during negotiations for the Treaty of Pereyaslav, between Bohdan Khmelnytsky, ruler of the Zaporozhian Host, and the Russian state.

The first theory of the origin of Ukrainian language was suggested in the Imperial Russia in the middle of the 18th century by Mikhail Lomonosov. This theory posits the existence of a common language spoken by all East Slavic people in the time of the Kievan Rus'. According to Lomonosov, the differences that subsequently developed between Great Russian and Ukrainian (then called Little Russian) could be explained by the influence of the Polish language on Ukrainian and the influence of Turkic languages on Russian during the period from 13th to 17th century.

The "Polonization" theory was criticized as early as in the first half of the nineteenth century by Mykhailo Maxymovych. In fact, the most distinctive features of the Ukrainian language are present neither in Russian nor in Polish. Ukrainian and Polish language do share a lot of common or similar words, but so do all Slavic languages, since many words are carried over from the Proto-Slavic language, the common ancestor of the modern ones. A much smaller part of their common vocabulary can be attributed to the later interaction of the two languages. The "Polonization" theory has not been taken seriously by the academic community since the beginning of the 20th century, but still has some circulation among anti-Ukrainian organizations and politicians.

Another point of view developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by linguists of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Similarly to Lomonosov, they assumed the existence of a common language spoken by East Slavs in the past. But unlike Lomonosov's hypothesis, this theory does not view "Polonization" or any other external influence as the main driving force that led to the formation of three different languages: Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian from the common Old East Slavic language. This general point of view is one of the most popular, particularly outside Ukraine. The supporters of this theory disagree, however, about the time when the different languages were formed.

Soviet scholars tend to admit a difference between Ukrainian and Russian only at later time periods (fourteenth through sixteenth centuries). According to this view, Old East Slavic diverged into Belarusian and Ukrainian to the west (collectively, the Ruthenian language of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries), and Old Russian to the north-east, after the political boundaries of Kievan Rus’ were redrawn in the fourteenth century. During the time of the incorporation of Ruthenia (Ukraine and Belarus) into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ukrainian and Belarusian diverged into identifiably separate languages.

Some scholars see a divergence between the language of Halych-Volhynia and the language of Novgorod-Suzdal by the 1100s, assuming that before the 12th century the two languages were practically indistinguishable. This point of view is, however, at variance with some historical data. In fact, several East Slavic tribes, such as Polans, Drevlyans, Severians, Dulebes (that later likely became Volhynians and Buzhans), White Croats, Tiverians and Ulichs lived on the territory of today's Ukraine long before the 12th century. Notably, some Ukrainian features were recognizable in the southern dialects of Old East Slavic as far back as the language can be documented.

Some researchers, while admitting the differences between the dialects spoken by East Slavic tribes in the 10th and 11th centuries, still consider them as "regional manifestations of a common language" (see, for instance, the article by Vasyl Nimchuk). In contrast, Ahatanhel Krymsky and Alexei Shakhmatov assumed the existence of the common spoken language of Eastern Slavs only in prehistoric times. According to their point of view, the diversification of the Old East Slavic language took place in the 8th or early 9th century.

A Ukrainian linguist Stepan Smal-Stocky went even further: he denied the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. Similar points of view were shared by Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo, Ivan Ohienko and others. According to this theory, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages during the 6th through 9th centuries. The Ukrainian language was formed by convergence of tribal dialects, mostly due to an intensive migration of the population within the territory of today's Ukraine in later historical periods. This point of view was also confirmed by phonological studies of Yuri Shevelov and is gaining a number of supporters among Ukrainian scientists.

Medieval history

Beyond the polemics between several ideological conceptions, the continuous presence of Slavic settlements in Ukraine, since at least the sixth century, provides an underlying ethno-linguistic factual basis for the origins of the Ukrainian language. The westernmost areas of modern-day Ukraine lay to the south of the postulated homeland of the original Slavs.

Immigration of Slavic tribes to the Western Slavic and Southern Slavic portions of Eastern Europe led to the dissolution of Early Common Slavic into three groups by the seventh century (East Slavic, West Slavic, and South Slavic). During this time period, some East Slavic elements could have provided a Slavic identity to the Antes civilization (of which nothing but an Iranian name is known).

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Literature

See Ukrainian literature

The literary Ukrainian language, which was preceded by Old East Slavic literature, may be subdivided into three stages: old Ukrainian (twelfth to fourteenth centuries), middle Ukrainian (fourteenth to eighteenth centuries), and modern Ukrainian (end of the eighteenth century to the present). Much literature was written in the periods of the old and middle Ukrainian language, including legal acts, polemical articles, science treatises and fiction of all sorts.

Influential literary figures in the development of modern Ukrainian literature include the philosopher Hryhori Skovoroda, Mykola Kostomarov, Mikhaylo Kotsyubinsky, Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka. The literary Ukrainian language is based on the dialect of the Poltava region, with some heavy influence from the dialects spoken in the west, notably Galicia (Halychyna). For most of its history, Russian letters were used for written Ukrainian (for example, by Shevchenko). The modern Ukrainian alphabet and orthography, which introduced the distinct letters і, ї, є, ґ, and modified the usage of и, was developed in the late nineteenth century in Austrian-controlled Galicia.

Ukrainophone

A Ukrainophone is a person who speaks the Ukrainian language.

In the modern nation of Ukraine almost all people can speak Ukrainian. However, many people are also 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.

Current usage

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 northern and central Ukraine, Russian is the language of the urban population, while in rural areas Ukrainian is much more common. In the south and the east of Ukraine, Russian is prevalent even in rural areas, and in Crimea, Ukrainian is almost absent.

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. 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.

Dialects

Several modern dialects of Ukrainian: exist

• Northern (Polissian) dialects:
  • Eastern Polissian is spoken in Chernihiv (excluding the southeastern districts), in the northern part of Sumy, and in the southeastern portion of the Kiev Oblast as well as in the adjacent areas of Russia, which include the southwestern part of the Bryansk Oblast (the area around Starodub), as well as in some places in the Kursk, Voronezh and Belgorod Oblasts. No linguistic border can be defined. The vocabulary approaches Russian as the language approaches the Russian Federation. Both Ukrainian and Russian grammar sets can be applied to this dialect. Thus, this dialect can be considered a transitional dialect between Ukrainian and Russian.
  • Central Polissian is spoken in the northwestern part of the Kiev Oblast, in the northern part of Zhytomyr and the northeastern part of the Rivne Oblast.
  • West Polissian is spoken in the northern part of the Volyn Oblast, the northwestern part of the Rivne Oblast as well as in the adjacent districts of the Brest Voblast in Belarus. The dialect spoken in Belarus uses Belarusian grammar, and thus is considered by some to be a dialect of Belarusian.
• Southeastern dialects:
  • Middle Dnieprian is the basis of the Standard Literary Ukrainian. It is spoken in the central part of Ukraine, primarily in the southern and eastern part of the Kiev Oblast). In addition, the dialects spoken in Cherkasy, Poltava and Kiev regions are considered to be close to "standard" Ukrainian.
  • Slobodan is spoken in Kharkiv, Sumy, Luhansk, and the northern part of Donetsk, as well as in the Voronezh and Belgorod regions of Russia. This dialect is formed from a gradual mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, with progressively more Russian in the northern and eastern parts of the region. Thus, there is no linguistic border between Russian and Ukrainian, and, thus, both grammar sets can be applied. This dialect is a transitional dialect between Ukrainian and Russian.
  • A Steppe dialect is spoken in southern and southeastern Ukraine. This dialect was originally the main language of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.
  • A Kuban dialect related to the Steppe dialect often referred to by the derogatory term of Balachka is spoken in the Kuban region in Russia, by the descendants of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who settled in that area in the late eighteenth century. This dialect features the use of some Russian vocabulary on a Ukrainian grammar substructure. There are 3 main variants according to location..
• Southwestern dialects:
  • Boyko is spoken by the Boyko people on the northern side of the Carpathian Mountains in the Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk Oblasts. It can also be heard across the border in the Subcarpathian Voivodship of Poland
  • Hutsul is spoken by the Hutsul people on the northern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, in the extreme southern parts of the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, as well as in parts of the Chernivtsi and Transcarpathian Oblasts, .
  • Lemko is spoken by the Lemko people, whose homeland rests outside the borders of Ukraine in the Prešov Region of Slovakia along the southern side of the Carpathian Mountains, and in the southeast of modern Poland, along the northern sides of the Carpathians.
  • Podillian is spoken in the southern parts of the Vinnytsia and Khmelnytskyi Oblasts, in the northern part of the Odessa Oblast, and in the adjacent districts of the Cherkasy Oblast, the Kirovohrad Oblast and the Mykolaiv Oblast.
  • Volynian is spoken in Rivne and Volyn, as well as in parts of Zhytomyr and Ternopil. It is also used in Chelm in Poland.
  • Pokuttia (Bukovynian) is spoken in the Chernivtsi Oblast of Ukraine. This dialect has some distinct volcabulary borrowed from Romanian.
  • Upper Dniestrian is considered to be the main Galician dialect, spoken in the Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk Oblasts. Its distinguishing characteristics are the influence of Polish and the German vocabulary, which is reminiscent of the Austro-Hungarian rule. Some of the distinct words used in this dialect can be found here.
  • Upper Sannian is spoken in the border area between Ukraine and Poland in the San river valley.
• The Rusyn language is considered by Ukrainian linguists to be a dialect of Ukrainian:
  • Dolinian Rusyn or Subcarpathian Rusyn is spoken in the Transcarpathian Oblast.
  • Pannonian or Bačka Rusyn is spoken in northwestern Serbia and eastern Croatia. Rusin language of the Bačka dialect is one of the official languages of the Serbian Autonomous Province of Vojvodina).
  • Pryashiv Rusyn is the Rusyn spoken in the Prešov (in Ukrainian: Pryashiv) region of Slovakia, as well as by some émigré communities, primarily in the United States of America.

Ukrainian is also spoken by a large émigré population, particularly in Canada (see Canadian Ukrainian), United States and several countries of South America like Argentina. The founders of this population primarily emigrated from Galicia, which used to be part of Austro-Hungary before World War I, and belonged to Poland between the World Wars. The language spoken by most of them is the Galician dialect of Ukrainian from the first half of the twentieth century. Compared with modern Ukrainian, the vocabulary of Ukrainians outside Ukraine reflects less influence of Russian, but often contains many loan words from the local language.

Ukrainophone population

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. Broken up by country (to the nearest thousand):

1. Ukraine 31,058,000
2. Russia 4,363,000 (1,815,000 according to the 2002 census)
3. Brazil 988,000
4. Kazakhstan 898,000
5. United States 844,000
6. Moldova 600,000
7. Belarus 291,000
8. Canada 200,525, 67,665 spoken at home in 2001, 148,000 spoken as "mother tongue" in 2006
9. Uzbekistan 153,000
10. Poland 150,000
11. Kyrgyzstan 109,000
12. Argentina 120,000
13. Latvia 78,000
14. Spain 69,000
15. Portugal 65,800
16. Romania 57,600
17. Slovakia 55,000
18. Georgia 52,000
19. Lithuania 45,000
20. Tajikistan 41,000
21. Turkmenistan 37,000
22. Australia 30,000
23. Azerbaijan 29,000
24. Paraguay 26,000
25. Estonia 21,000
26. Armenia 8,000
27. Hungary 4,900 (according to the 2001 census)
28. Serbia 3,000

Ukrainian is the official language of Ukraine. The language is also one of three official languages of the breakaway Moldovan republic of Transnistria.

Ukraine 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-recognised 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.

Language structure

Cyrillic letters in this article are romanized using scientific transliteration.

Grammar

Old East Slavic (and Russian) o in closed syllables, that is, ending in a consonant, in many cases corresponds to a Ukrainian i, as in pod->pid ‘under’. Thus, in the declension of nouns, the o can re-appear as it is no longer located in a closed syllable, such as rik (nom): rotsi (loc) ‘year’.

Ukrainian case endings are somewhat different from Old East Slavic, and the vocabulary includes a large overlay of Polish terminology. Russian na pervom etaže ‘on the first floor’ is in the prepositional case. The Ukrainian corresponding expression is na peršomu poversi. -omu is the standard locative (prepositional) ending, but variants in -im are common in dialect and poetry, and allowed by the standards bodies. The x of Ukrainian poverx has mutated into s under the influence of the soft vowel i (k is similarly mutable into c in final positions). Ukrainian is the only modern East Slavic language which preserves the vocative case.

There have been some disputes over the existence of the dual number of the noun. Ilko Korunets' argues that nouns in Ukrainian as well as in Russian and a few other Slavonic languages, have three numbers: singular, dual and plural. He pointed out that there is a difference in noun forms which are used with different numerals. For example: odyn rik, ‘one year’ — dva/try/čotyry roky, ‘two/three/four years’ — pjat’... rokiv, ‘five etc. years’. But he seems to represent the very rare opinion. The overwhelming majority of linguists finds only two numbers (singular and plural). See Dual (grammatical number)#Dual form in Slavic languages.

Sounds

The Ukrainian language has five vowels, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, and two approximants /j/, /ʋ/.

A number of the consonants come in three forms: hard, soft (palatalized) and long, for example, /l/, /lʲ/, and /ll/ or /n/, /nʲ/, and /nn/. Ukrainians tend to pronounce long sounds where the letters are doubled in other languages, English or Russian, for example.

The letter г represents different consonants in Old East Slavic and Ukrainian. Ukrainian г /ɦ/, often transliterated as Latin h, is the voiced equivalent of Old East Slavic х /x/. The Russian (and Old East Slavic) letter г denotes /g/. Russian-speakers from Ukraine and Southern Russia often use the soft Ukrainian г, in place of the hard Old East Slavic one. The Ukrainian alphabet has the additional letter ґ, for representing /g/, which appears in some Ukrainian words such as gryndžoly (ґринджоли, ‘sleigh’) and gudzyk (ґудзик, ‘button’). However, the letter ґ appears almost exclusively in loan words. This sound is still more rare in Ukrainian than in Czech or Slovak.

Another phonetic divergence between the two languages is the pronunciation of /v/ (Cyrillic в). While in standard Russian it represents /v/, in Ukrainian it denotes both /v/ and /ʋ/ (at the end of a syllable—a labiodental approximant somewhat in between the v in victory and the w in water). Unlike Russian and most other modern Slavic languages, Ukrainian does not have final devoicing.

Alphabet

Template:Ukrainian alphabet

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 letter ge ґ was banned in the Soviet Union from 1933 until the Ukrainian independence in 1990.

The alphabet comprises thirty-three letters, representing thirty-eight phonemes (meaningful units of sound), and an additional sign—the apostrophe. Ukrainian orthography is based on the phonemic principle, with one letter generally corresponding to one phoneme, although there are a number of exceptions. The orthography also has cases where the semantic, historical, and morphological principles are applied.

The letter щ represents two consonants . The combination of with some of the vowels is also represented by a single letter (=я, =є, =ї, =ю), while =йо and the rare regional =йи are written using two letters. These iotated vowel letters and a special soft sign change a preceding consonant from hard to soft. An apostrophe is used to indicate the hardness of the sound in the cases when normally the vowel would change the consonant to soft.

A letter is repeated to indicate that the sound is long.

The phonemes and do not have dedicated letters in the alphabet and are rendered with the digraphs дз and дж, respectively. is pronounced like English ds in pods, is like g in huge.

See also Drahomanivka, Ukrainian Latin alphabet.

See also

• Surzhyk
• Swadesh list of Ukrainian words
• Ukrainianization

Template:Ukrainian topics

References

1. Ukrainian language, Encyclopædia Britannica
2. http://litopys.org.ua/zyzlex/zyz.htm
3. The Polonization of the Ukrainian Nobility
4. Template:Ru icon Nikolay Kostomarov, Russian History in Biographies of its main figures, Chapter Knyaz Kostantin Konstantinovich Ostrozhsky (Konstanty Wasyl Ostrogski)
5. "http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9074133?query=Ukrainian%20language&ct=". {{cite web}}: External link in |title= (help); Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
6. http://www.litopys.org.ua/shevelov/shev.htm
7. http://litopys.narod.ru/pivtorak/pivt.htm
8. http://litopys.narod.ru/istkult/ikult01.htm
9. http://www.litopys.org.ua/shevelov/shev.htm
10. http://litopys.org.ua/ukrmova/um156.htm
11. http://litopys.org.ua/ukrmova/um184.htm
12. http://litopys.org.ua/ukrmova/um161.htm
13. http://litopys.org.ua/ukrmova/um155.ht
14. http://www.ethnology.ru/doc/narod/t1/gif/nrd-t1_0151z.gif
15. http://litopys.org.ua/ukrmova/um167.htm
16. http://www.belarusguide.com/as/map_text/havorki.html
17. http://litopys.org.ua/ukrmova/um160.htm
18. http://litopys.org.ua/ukrmova/um169.htm
19. http://www.ethnology.ru/doc/narod/t1/gif/nrd-t1_0151z.gif
20. http://litopys.org.ua/ukrmova/um171.htm
21. http://harazd.net/~nadbuhom/mapy-historia/mapy_8.htm
22. http://litopys.org.ua/ukrmova/um159.htm
23. http://litopys.org.ua/ukrmova/um180.htm
24. http://www.ji.lviv.ua/n36-1texts/gwara.htm
25. Source, unless specified: Ethnologue
26. http://www.perepis2002.ru/ct/html/TOM_04_04.htm
27. Mother tongue "refers to the first language learned at home in childhood and still understood by the individual at the time of the census." More detailed language figures are to be reported in December 2007. Statistics Canada (2007). Canada at a Glance 2007, p. 4.
28. http://www.nepszamlalas.hu/hun/kotetek/18/tables/load1_33_3.html
29. The Constitution of Transnistria, Article 12

• Luckyj, George S.N. ( 1990). Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934, revised and updated edition, Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-1099-6.
• G.Y. Shevelov (1979). A Historical Phonology of the Ukrainian Language. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Verlag. ISBN 3-533-02787-2.. Ukrainian translation is partially available online.
• Григорій Петрович Півторак (Hryhoriy Pivtorak) (1998). Походження українців, росіян, білорусів та їхніх мов (The origin of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians and their languages). Kiev: Akademia. ISBN 966-580-082-5., (in Ukrainian). Available online.
• Subtelny, Orest (1988). Ukraine: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,. ISBN 0-8020-5808-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• Василь Німчук. Періодизація як напрямок дослідження генези та історії української мови. Мовознавство. 1997.- Ч.6.-С.3-14; 1998.
• Микола Лесюк "Різнотрактування історії української мови".
• Ilko V. Korunets' (2003). Contrastive Topology of the English and Ukrainian Languages. Vinnytsia: Nova Knyha Publishers,. ISBN 966-7890-27-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• "What language is spoken in Ukraine", in Welcome to Ukraine, 2003, 1.
• All-Ukrainian population census 2001
• Конституція України (Constitution of Ukraine) (in Ukrainian), 1996, English translation (excerpts).
• 1897 census

External links

• English-Ukrainian Dictionary
• Ukrainian–English Dictionary
• Ethnologue report for Ukrainian
• Dialects of Ukrainian language
• Ukrainian language - the third official? - Ukrayinska Pravda, 28 November 2005

• Ukrainian language
• East Slavic languages
• Languages of Azerbaijan
• Languages of Kazakhstan
• Languages of Hungary
• Languages of Russia
• Languages of Ukraine
• Languages of Serbia
• Languages of Vojvodina