Volodymyr Kukharenko

Helping translation companies to automate business and project management

ℙ𝕣𝕠𝕥𝕖𝕞𝕠𝕤 𝕋𝕣𝕒𝕟𝕤𝕝𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝔹𝕦𝕤𝕚𝕟𝕖𝕤𝕤 𝕄𝕒𝕟𝕒𝕘𝕖𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥 𝕊𝕪𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕞

Kyiv

Sept 23, 2025

“Ukrainian language is just Russian spoiled by Poles,” – Russian propagandists claim. Now, let’s look at some facts:

First Dictionaries:
First Ukrainian-printed dictionary: Lexis (1596) by Lavrentii Zyzanii.
First comprehensive Ukrainian dictionary: Lexicon Slovenoroskyi… (1627) by Pavlo Berynda.
First Russian dictionary: Dictionary of the Russian Academy, 1789–1794. More than 150 years later!

Word Count:
The Great Orthographic Dictionary of Modern Ukrainian Vocabulary has about 253,000 entries.
The Great Academic Dictionary of Russian (20 volumes, 1950s–1990s) contains only about 130,000 words.

Perhaps it is explained by the fact that Ukrainian is rich in synonyms. For example, the word “horizon” has 12 synonyms: obriy, nebozvid, neboskhy l, kraynebo, kruhovyd, kruhozir, kruhoglyad, vydnokruh, vydnokol o, vydnokray, nebokray, ovyd.

So, we made the dictionary earlier, and our current dictionary has more words. Impressive for a “dialect”, huh?

Vocabulary Similarity:
The closest language to Ukrainian by vocabulary is Belarusian (84% shared lexicon), it’s mutually understandable. Next are Polish (70%) and Slovak (68%). Russian comes only after that, with 62%. Czech is also 62%.

For comparison, the similarity between Portuguese and Romanian is 72%, and English–German similarity is ≈60%. But Russians insist that 62% common words is still “one language” or “just dialect”.

In terms of phonetics and grammar, Ukrainian shares 22–29 features with Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, and Polish, but only 11 with Russian.

At different points in history, Ukrainian was called prosta (simple), ruska (Ruthenian), rusynska (Rusin), kozatska (Cossack), etc. The most common historical name until the mid-19th century was “Ruska mova” (Ruthenian language).

I had a couple of funny experiences myself:

Once, while on vacation, I was speaking Ukrainian with my wife. A Russian family overheard us and tried to guess our ethnicity. They decided we were Slovaks. I barely managed not to laugh in their faces! They couldn’t even recognize Ukrainian, let alone understand it!

Another time, in Slovakia, during a skiing trip, I had to deal with the police after our hotel room was robbed. Since the officer didn’t speak English, I switched to Ukrainian. We managed to communicate for over an hour and a half, he spoke Slovak, I replied in Ukrainian. Occasionally, I just had to pick a synonym to make myself clear.

And when I was in Krakow (Poland), I also switched to Ukrainian when English did not work well. And simple phrases were understandable if you got used to different phonetics.

So Ukrainian has more in common with the languages of its Western neighbors than with Russian, and that’s after centuries of Russian dominance and many prohibitions, persecutions, and forced assimilations! Imagine how different the languages were before Moskovites came. I bet you would need a translator. Languages developed separately for many centuries.

Comment from :

Alexander Kozlov

Quite true, I had no problem communicating via Ukrainian in a Krakow pub with locals a while back when I was visiting. One of them told me a curious thing – she could sing a song in Russian that she memorized in school for music class, but she did not understand the word meaning.

Viktor Korovyanko

A few remarks. Ukrainian and Belarusian (and also Rusyn or Ruthenian language) are essentially one language, since both countries were part of Kyivan Rus and later the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was essentially a reformatting of Rus after the Mongol-Tatar invasion. In the Belarusian language, I counted as many as three exclusively Belarusian words. The rest of the words are easily traced to Ukrainian or are borrowed from Russian or Polish. Lavrenty Zyzany called the Russian language “Slovenian”. This term then meant what is now called Church Slavonic language, since the Russian language was formed precisely as an adaptation of the old Macedonian language, which the brothers Cyril and Methodius used to translate the Bible. The Russian language was formed as a result of the spread of Christianity, and not evolutionary, like other languages.

Max Popko

Tbis is an awesome analysis! This is extremely important for all to understand. Thank you for doing this!

Jean-Marc Trouille

Jean Monnet Chair in European Economic Integration.

I used to teach a module at a business school in Warsaw for ten years. I was always amazed to see how students, mostly from Poland and Ukraine, but also Belarus (and occasionally russia) could communicate with each other during coffee breaks without the medium of English or any lingua franca.

…………….

My younger daughter (7 years old) cannot speak Russian. She cannot read Russian either. She understands it because people around her in Kyiv still speak it, but if she tries to speak, she struggles.

My older daughter (10 years old) can read Russian, and she spoke it before she turned 7. I asked her to read a text in Russian aloud, and I noticed she now has an accent and cannot reproduce Russian phonetics correctly anymore. Speaking Russian is hard for her too.

Even me, a professional linguist and translator, notice that when I speak Russian, I have to make efforts not to use Ukrainian words occasionally. It feels foreign after 3 years.

I am not the only one who switched back to Ukrainian. I see that when the current generation of children grows up, a large part of them will create and consume content in Ukrainian, because their parents switched. They will use less content from Russia, and that matters a lot. Fewer people will believe Russian propaganda, which penetrates everywhere, even into cartoons and fairy tales.

Ah, one more thing… I often see comments like: “But they’ll miss so much by not reading Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Pushkin! Poor kids!” Well, here’s my confession: I didn’t read them either, but I did read plenty, starting from Greek philosophers to French, German, English, and American classics. And I’m fine. So will my kids.

Comment from :

Paul T.

Anecdotally, this is in line with what I have seen in Saint Omer, where families, even native speakers from Kharkiv, have completely abandoned Russian language. (One who comes to mind is Kateryna Dzereviago).

In a more formal sense, there is data to support the change in language use, and Artem Moskovetsand I have published that in Zeitschrift für Slawistik. Our closing line summed it up: Our data, when viewed in light of derussification and decolonization, further supports the role that language has in establishing a national identity.

https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/slaw-2024-0022/html

🌏 Yevgen S.

CPM | IBP | Professional Services. The cavalry is not coming. We are the cavalry!2h

The so called “russian culture” is a tiny shallow puddle half an inch deep and 10 inches wide, and it’s 100% derivative. I pass the mike to Somerset Maughan.