Language Fact File – Ukrainian

Ukrainian is spoken as a native language in: Ukraine

Number of native speakers: 33 million

Learn some: Greet someone at any time of day with the casual ‘pryvit’, which means hello or hi. If you want to go one further and ask how they are, it’s ‘yak spravy?’

Fast facts:

It’s easy to make your writing more interesting in Ukrainian, as there are so many synonyms – words that have approximately the same meaning. Even a very specific word like ‘horizon’ has 12 synonyms!

Ukrainian is a very old language, though exactly how old is the subject of debate. It evolved from Old East Slavic, which diverged into several modern Eastern European languages.

Ukrainian is known for its widespread use of diminutive forms (making the subject little, eg the diminutive of ‘book’ in English is ‘booklet’), which is made by changing the word ending. This is often applied to names to express affection, eg Oksana would be Oksanchik or Oksanochka. Like Spanish, Ukrainian uses these a lot!