Ukrainian

關於Ukrainian

Ukrainian (українська) is the official language of Ukraine, and spoken by over 40 million people inside and outside of Ukraine. Among Ukrainian citizens there are very few who speak only Ukrainian, very few who speak only Russian, while virtually everyone speaks both. In general Ukrainian is most dominant in Western Ukraine, while Russian is more commonly used in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, and people from Central Ukraine tend to codeswitch regularly between Russian and Ukrainian, with this resultant pidgin often referred to as Surzhyk. In the capital Kyiv, Russian is still the most commonly used language, while most signage tends to be in Ukrainian. The usage of Ukrainian is gradually increasing in Ukraine, as it is more popular with the younger post-Soviet generation who grew up with the Ukrainian language in school. Outside Ukraine, it is spoken by the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States and Canada.

Ukrainian is an East Slavic language most similar to Belarusian, and more distantly related to Russian, with strong influences from Polish and Slovak. Ukrainian is, to a lesser extent, lexically similar to other Slavic languages such as Czech, Bulgarian and so on. It uses a variation of the Cyrillic alphabet.

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