Ukrainian language

Ukrainian (українська мова, ukrainska mova, IPA: [ʊkrɐˈjinʲsʲkɐ ˈmɔʋɐ]) is an East Slavic language of the Indo-European language family spoken primarily in Ukraine. It is the native language of a majority of Ukrainians.

Written Ukrainian uses the Ukrainian alphabet, a variant of the Cyrillic script. The standard Ukrainian language is studied by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NANU; particularly by its Institute for the Ukrainian Language), and Potebnia Institute of Linguistics. Comparisons are often drawn to Russian, another East Slavic language, but there is more mutual intelligibility with Belarusian.

Ukrainian is a descendant of Old East Slavic, a language spoken in the medieval state of Kievan Rus'. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the language developed into Ruthenian, where it became an official language, before a process of Polonization began in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. By the 18th century, Ruthenian diverged into regional variants, and the modern Ukrainian language developed in the territory of present-day Ukraine. Russification saw the Ukrainian language banned as a subject from schools and as a language of instruction in the Russian Empire, and continued in various ways in the Soviet Union. Even so, the language continued to see use throughout the country, and remained particularly strong in Western Ukraine.