Nevertheless, Russian remains a widely used language in Ukraine in pop culture and in informal and business communication.
Around 30% of people speak both Russian and Ukrainian at home — they can understand both languages and use them interchangeably also in different spheres of life. The war makes more people in Ukraine learn about the origins of Russian-speaking surrounding in contemporary Ukraine.
Because Russian culture dominated the days of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, most Ukrainians can speak Russian.
If you already speak Russian, learning Ukrainian will be really easy, since both languages use Cyrillic and have similar uses of grammar and syntax. Besides, a great number of words are written in the same way, despite their use might be different, but then again, it will be a matter of practicing the language.
The Ukrainian language is easier to learn than Russian, as Russian has more complex grammar. Learning Ukrainian also makes it easier to learn other Eastern European languages, as it is closer to Czech, Slovak, and Polish. Whereas, if you learn Russian, you can understand fewer languages naturally.
From the point of view of spoken language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn, the other three languages in the East Slavic branch.
While there are similarities in the grammar, Ukrainian tends to closer to that of Russian than Polish.
As of 2022, 81% of the population of Ukraine speak the Ukrainian language in their personal life, at the same time 34% speak Russian, meaning that significant portion of Ukrainian residents constituting 19% of people speak both languages regularly.
Many historic documents prove that the Ukrainian language, and Ukrainian state, appeared earlier than the Russian ones. Russian comes from the Old Slavonic language, which was introduced by Kyivan colonizers to Muscovites, who were essentially Finno-Ugric.
The most popular phrase is “pryvit” – which is the equivalent of “hi” or “hello” in Ukrainian.
(17.3% of the population of Ukraine).
With the gradual urbanization of Society in the late 19th century, Ukrainian migrants from rural areas who settled in the cities entered a Russian-speaking milieu. With all State educational instruction and cultural establishments using Russian many Ukrainians were forced to use the Russian language.
Today Russian Orthodoxy is the country's largest religious denomination, representing more than half of all adherents.
Is Russian and Polish Mutually Intelligible? Russian is East Slavonic and Polish is West Slavonic. While the two share a similar grammar system and some vocabulary words, Polish and Russian aren't mutually intelligible. If a Russian person lands in Warsaw, nobody would understand him if he only spoke Russian.
According to the survey, Russian is used at home by 43–46% of the population of the country (in other words a similar proportion to Ukrainian) and Russophones make a majority of the population in Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine: Autonomous Republic of Crimea — 97% of the population.
Russian is allegedly one of the most complex languages to learn; its Cyrillic alphabet is enough to scare you away. In fact, the Foreign Service Institute classifies it as a category-four language. But don't let that intimidate you. Learning the Russian language is far from impossible.
Russian is the official language of Russia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and it's considered an unofficial lingua franca in Ukraine and many former Soviet countries. These include Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Ukrainian is considered a difficult language for English speakers to learn because the two languages have significant differences. The Ukrainian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet and English uses the Latin alphabet. Ukrainian also has seven case endings and other tricky grammar rules.
English language in Ukraine
The younger generation in Ukraine tends to speak a decent level of English due to a knowledge of English being associated with leading to better prospects, within Ukraine and the wider English speaking countries and educational institutions.
Overall, 77.8% of Ukraine's population self-identified as ethnically Ukrainian and 17.3% as ethnically Russian.
Russian is a widely spoken language in the world, with an estimated 260 million native speakers and an additional 120 million non-native speakers.
If you're looking for the easiest Slavic language to learn, we would suggest Bulgarian with the lack of grammatical cases.
After the Union of Lublin in 1569 and the formation of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth Ukraine fell under the Polish administration, becoming part of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. The period immediately following the creation of the Commonwealth saw a huge revitalisation in colonisation efforts.
In terms of vocabulary, the Ukrainian language is the closest to Belarusian (16% of difference), and the Russian language to Bulgarian (27% of difference). After Belarusian, Ukrainian is also closer to Slovak, Polish, and Czech than to Russian – 38% of Ukrainian vocabulary is different from Russian.