How Ukrainian and Russian Differ

Ukraine’s capital is written Київ in Ukrainian. Under the transliteration table set by the Ukrainian government, that becomes Kyiv in the Latin alphabet. The second letter, ї, does not exist in the Russian alphabet.

Ukrainian and Russian are both written in Cyrillic and both classified as East Slavic languages. Because they look alike, from Japan they can sometimes seem like “regional variants of the same language.” But when you line up their letters, sounds, and vocabulary, it becomes clear that the two have been shaped as separate languages.

Letters — і, ї, є, ґ exist; ы, э, ъ, ё do not

According to the “Alphabet” entry of the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU), compiled by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, the modern Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters. The Latin-alphabet transliteration table set by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine in 2010 (Resolution No. 55) lists them one by one.

Among them are four letters not used in Russian.

• і — i in the transliteration table. Example: Іванків (Ivankiv)
• ї — yi at the start of a word, i elsewhere. Example: Київ (Kyiv)
• є — ye at the start of a word, ie elsewhere. Example: Єнакієве (Yenakiieve)
• ґ — g in the transliteration table. Example: Ґорґани (Gorgany)

Conversely, the Ukrainian alphabet has no ы, э, ъ, or ё. Of these, IEU calls ы specifically “a Russian letter.”

This difference is not just a matter of preference. According to IEU’s “Yaryzhka alphabet” entry, under the 1876 Ems Ukase, Ukrainian-language publications within the Russian Empire were required to be printed using the Russian alphabet. This way of writing was derisively called “yaryzhka,” a name that comes from the name of the Russian letter ы (yery). The restriction lasted until 1905.

The letter ґ has its own turbulent history too. According to IEU’s “Orthography” entry, the Stalinist regime revised Ukrainian orthography in the 1930s to bring it closer to Russian, and in 1933 banned the use of ґ altogether in loanwords and foreign personal names. The 1990 orthography restored ґ in a limited set of words.

Sounds — ‘г’ is close to h, and o alternates with i

Even the same Cyrillic letter can be pronounced differently. A clear case is г. The transliteration table above renders Ukrainian г as h and ґ as g (Гадяч = Hadiach, Ґалаґан = Galagan). IEU’s “Ukrainian language” entry explains that the shift from g to h occurred across the whole Ukrainian-language region around the year 1200, citing noha (leg/foot) as an example.

What IEU calls “one of the most conspicuous features of modern Ukrainian” is the alternation between o and i. “Cat” is kit (кіт), but in the genitive (“of the cat”) it reverts to kota (кота). According to the same entry, the earliest documented example of this alternation dates to 1653.

IEU also lists the treatment of unstressed vowels as a feature distinguishing the East Slavic languages from one another. Its explanation is that the dialects ancestral to Ukrainian split from those ancestral to Belarusian by continuing to distinguish o from a even in unstressed syllables.

Ukrainian also has two letters, и and і, that represent different sounds. According to IEU, и is a sound between i and y, which arose through changes from the 13th century onward. Because both end up as “i” when written in Japanese kana, readers should note that the distinction easily disappears when read in Japanese.

Vocabulary — the same shape of phrase, different words

What about vocabulary? The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s “Ukrainian language” entry writes that Ukrainian has many loanwords from Polish and fewer borrowings from Church Slavonic than Russian does. IEU goes further, stating that as borrowing from Polish and other sources progressed from the late 14th through the 16th century, Ukrainian vocabulary came to resemble the West Slavic languages more closely than it resembles Russian or Church Slavonic.

Let’s compare a few short, everyday words. The Ukrainian column reflects the entries in a Ukrainian dictionary (СУМ), and, in the accompanying pronunciation guides, capitalization is used to show the position of the stress rather than actual vowel length. The Russian column gives the headwords from a Russian orthographic dictionary (edited by Lopatin).

For “yes” and “no,” the words themselves are entirely different. On the other hand, спасибі, one of the Ukrainian words for “thank you,” is listed in Ukrainian dictionaries as synonymous with дякую, showing that Ukrainian also contains words close in form to Russian’s спасибо.

“Goodbye” is an example where the construction is the same but the word differs. Both до побачення and до свидания are built from the preposition до, meaning “until,” plus a noun meaning “meeting” (побачення / свидание). In both languages, you can insert an adjective in between to say “до скорого побачення” or “до скорого свидания” (“see you again soon”). Same skeleton, different word inside it. This single word captures well how close, and how far apart, the two languages are.

A history of being dismissed as ‘just a dialect’

The claim that Ukrainian is a dialect of Russian did not emerge as a conclusion of linguistics. It was put forward by the Russian Empire as a reason to stop Ukrainian-language publishing.

According to IEU’s “Valuev, Petr” entry, Pyotr Valuev, the Russian Empire’s Minister of the Interior, banned Ukrainian-language publications (with the exception of literary works) in a secret directive dated July 30, 1863. The reasoning given was as follows:

No separate Little Russian language has ever existed, does not exist, and cannot exist. The dialect used by the common people, having been corrupted by Polish influence, is nothing other than the Russian language itself.

Valuev’s directive (1863). Retranslated via the Japanese rendering of the English translation in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine’s “Valuev, Petr” entry.

“Little Russia” was a name used to refer to Ukraine in the imperial period. This claim led to an even broader ban under the 1876 Ems Ukase. Its content, alongside events in Japan in the same period, is covered in detail in The Year After Ukrainian-Language Publishing Was Banned in the Russian Empire, the University of Tokyo Opened.

This claim was rejected by the empire’s own academic institution. According to IEU’s “Revolution of 1905” entry, in March 1905 the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg declared that Ukrainian was not a dialect of Russian but an independent Slavic language, and recommended lifting the restrictions imposed by the Valuev Circular and the Ems Ukase.

In the Soviet period, a different kind of pressure was applied. IEU’s “Russification” entry records, with figures, how Russian became the language of the party and administration after Soviet power was established, how the party turned to an extreme anti-Ukrainian policy in 1932–33, and how, after the war, schools, universities, and academic publishing increasingly switched to Russian. The 1933 ban on ґ mentioned earlier belongs to this same trend.

How linguistics treats the question

Current scholarly encyclopedias treat Ukrainian as an independent language. IEU’s “Ukrainian language” entry (written by the linguist George Y. Shevelov) counts Ukrainian as one of the twelve living languages of the Slavic branch, and explains that during the “Proto-Ukrainian” period from the 6th century to the mid-11th century, features not shared with neighboring dialects accumulated until Ukrainian emerged as a separate language.

However, sources differ on exactly when Ukrainian can be said to have become a separate language. Britannica writes that Ukrainian was indistinguishable from Russian and Belarusian until the 12th or 13th century, and that dialectal features separating Ukrainian from its sister languages appeared after the collapse of Kyivan Rus in the 13th century. Both sources take it as given that Ukrainian is an independent language. What differs is where they place the point at which it began to diverge.

How mutually intelligible are they

Britannica writes that Ukrainian is less similar to Russian than Belarusian is, and that the three languages are “partially” mutually intelligible.

What “partially” means in practice must vary considerably from person to person. Someone who grew up hearing both languages daily and someone who grew up with only one will understand the same sentence to different degrees. Figures claiming “such-and-such percent” of shared vocabulary between Ukrainian and Russian are also commonly seen, but this article does not cite one, because we could not trace which source produced it or how it was counted back to a primary reference.

The linguistic situation of which language has been spoken where in Ukraine is also covered in Language in Ukraine. You cannot infer a person’s views or position from the language they speak alone.

In the single letter ї of Київ is packed the history of a language that has come through eras when it was banned from print and eras when its letters were stripped away.