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10 Interesting Facts About The Ukrainian Language

10 Interesting Facts About The Ukrainian Language

SpeakUA Team

  1. Russian is younger than Ukrainian and comes from Ukrainian church speech (Church Slavonic) and a mixture of Tatar-Finnish.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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%).
  5. 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. 
  6. The modern Ukrainian language has three main dialects: northern, southwestern and southeastern.
  7. 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.
  8. The first Ukrainian ABC book (“Азбука”) was printed in 1574 in Lviv by the first printer Ivan Fedorov. 
  9. 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.
  10. 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?