Ukrainian phrasebook Attractions & Activities - The Best Holiday Destinations for 2020
Ukrainian is spoken by over 40 million people in Ukraine and other countries. Among Ukrainian citizens there are few very few who speak only Ukrainian, very few who speak only Russian, and virtually everyone speaks both. In general the Western part of Ukraine speaks mostly Ukrainian (usually around Lviv (Lvov is a Russian version, and Lwow [lvoov] is a Polish one), while Russian is more commonly used else where, including Kiev, but it has always been bilingual throughout its history as Russian and Ukrainian speakers understand each other without the need of a translator. One common trait of Ukrainian is that it often replaces Russian e/ye and o/yo with i/yi. For instance, the patronymic suffixes -ov or -yov in Russian are -iv/-yiv in Ukrainian.
Ukrainian is an East Slavic language most similar to Russian and Belorussian, with strong similarities with Polish. It uses a variation of Cyrillic alphabet (some cosmetic [there are some false friends and letters that are used in only one of the languages] differences from Russian), but there are many words that are more similar to Polish than to Russian. The Russian hard sign is not used but rather an apostrophe is put in its place. Either way, the apostrophe and the hard sign it represents are very rarely used in Ukrainian since the 1918 spelling reform.
Ukrainian is comparatively very similar towards Russian: much of the vocabulary is similar to Russian, the grammar is very similar, but the differences include easier pronunciation and the addition of one other case: The Vocative.
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