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Important basic words

Ukrainian words about family

Basic questions and phrases

Ukrainian words about transportation

Know more about Ukraine

The history of Ukraine has been significantly shaped by its location and landscape. Dividing the Ukrainian countryside and flowing into the Black Sea, the Дніпро (Dnieper) River provides covetable transportation routes connecting Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. This fact has provoked invasions from neighbors near and far for centuries — including Scandinavia, Mongolia, Poland, and Russia.

Within the last century, Ukraine has endured Soviet rule, including the atrocity of the Holodomor. The Ukrainian dissident movement embodied some of the people’s struggles.

In 1991, during the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine declared its independence. In the years since it became an independent nation, Ukraine has worked hard to build its swiftly growing economyalmost from scratch. Not only did the new nation have to establish its own currency — called гривня (hryvnia) — but it plunged boldly into international trade.

Ukraine has faced several seismic events in its democratic self-government, including the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Euromaidan Revolution in 2014. March 2014 also brought the Russian invasion of Crimea. In response to the Russian occupation, tens of thousands of Tatars fled the Crimean peninsula.

Cultural facts 

Like any nation, modern Ukraine is not homogeneous in its identity or political attitudes, which can sometimes reflect regional origin, native language, and ethnic group. Along with the Ukrainian ethnic majority, the country is home to a variety of ethnic groups, including Bulgarians, Poles, Jews, Romanians, Russians, Hungarians, Moldovans, Belarusians, and Crimean Tatars. Although most religious Ukrainians practice Christianity, there are some adherents to Islam and Judaism.

On special occasions, Ukrainians enjoy feasts of traditional foods such as борщ (borshch, beet soup) and го́лубці (hólubci, stuffed cabbage rolls). Singing and music are an integral part of Ukrainian cultural expression, with traditional instruments, stylings, and vocal techniques sometimes finding their way into contemporary artists’ work. The country’s strong folk music culture is still vibrant. It plays side-by-side on the airwaves with heavy metal, jazz, reggae, and punk, all featuring lyrics in Ukrainian. Modern Ukrainian literature and Ukrainian cinema depict life in different eras and regions of the country.

Besides music, literature, and film, Ukraine has given the world other distinctive cultural contributions. The country is known for its tradition of intricately painted eggs, called писанки́ (pysanky), as well its colorful вишива́нка (vyshyvanka) embroidery. In a modern twist, traditional-style Ukrainian pottery is being sold as NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in exchange for cryptocurrency.

The Ukrainian language

Spoken by 45 million people worldwide, Ukrainian is a melodic language. It’s full of subtle shades of meaning, lending itself well to poetry and prose.

Despite a misconception that Ukrainian is simply a dialect of Russian, Ukrainian and Russian are about as different as French and Spanish. The Ukrainian and Russian languages both grew from Old East Slavic, but started diverging over six hundred years ago. The unique history of each language has resulted in several key differences in writing, pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

Alphabet and pronunciation

Ukrainian and Russian use two different alphabets, both based on Cyrillic writing systems. Ukrainian has some letters, like ґ, і, and ї, that Russian doesn’t have — and vice versa. Some shared letters — like г, щ, and е — are pronounced differently in one language versus the other.

Ukrainian is much more phonetic than Russian. In Russian, the о (as in молоко, “milk”) is sometimes pronounced more like an “a,” depending on its position in the word. This is called “vowel reduction.” In Ukrainian, the position of a letter in a word doesn’t change its pronunciation.

Grammar

Ukrainian has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). There are no words for “the” or “a/an” in Ukrainian. The language has seven grammatical cases, which change the forms of words, depending on how they are used in a sentence. Ukrainian has a vocative case for directly addressing people, which Russian has since lost.

Ukrainian also has a pluperfect verb tense and an imperfective synthetic future verb tense, both of which Russian lacks.

Vocabulary

Russian and Ukrainian are only about 65% mutually intelligible and more than 30% of the vocabulary differs between the two languages. By some estimates, this difference is almost as high as 40%.

Ukrainian and Russian have some words that sound nearly the same, but they mean entirely different things. These words are known as “false friends” or “false cognates.” An example is родина, which means “family” in Ukrainian, but “homeland” in Russian. Such differences in meaning can lead to misunderstandings.

Finally, as you can see in the table below, Ukrainian and Russian words for some of the most common ideas do not spring from shared roots.

The months of the year are especially different between Ukrainian and Russian, since the Russian calendar adopted month names based on Latin, rather than Slavic roots.

Startup ecosystem 

Despite an economy based largely on manufacturing and agriculture, 21st century Ukraine has been moving firmly toward a cutting-edge, startup economy. This builds upon a long tradition of Ukrainian innovation in science and technology — including the prototypes of compact discs and X-ray machines.

Since around 2010, Ukraine has been a hotbed of startups in numerous industries, such as app development, medicine, education, and ecommerce. Among the many Ukrainian startup success stories are Grammarly, GitLab, and Preply, used by millions worldwide.

With some of the most skilled software developers in the world, Ukraine has also attracted tech industry giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Skype, and Oracle. These and many other Fortune 500 companies have established research and development facilities in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation works to facilitate bureaucratic processes through technology, which supports its entrepreneurs in their international business dealings. Ukraine is the first country in the world to legalize digital passports, making business travel easier. Ukraine also legalized the use of cryptocurrencies, providing a framework of law for virtual asset transactions in its tax code. These types of innovations have positioned Ukraine as a leader in both technology and business.

Stand with Ukraine

If you know anybody that may benefit from this list, please share it with them. Knowing just a tiny part of their language can help those displaced feel less frustrated and isolated, and enable them to ask for basic needs and information.

If you’re unable to offer refuge or struggling to find the words like many of us are, your actions matter. Please consider donating to these valuable causes.

And if you do have the words to support the people in Ukraine with messages of hope, peace and solidarity, we are building a global message board with messages from all around the world, in every language. Contribute now by completing this questionnaire.