The Ukrainian language is one of the Slavic languages and officially the second most melodic language (after Italian) and the third most beautiful language in the world (after French and Persian). Back in 1934, it won the bronze in the language competition for its phonetics, vocabulary, phraseology, and sentence structure. We have collected some interesting facts about Ukrainian that may surprise you.
1. The first mention of “Ukraine” appeared in the Ipatiev Chronicle more than eight hundred years ago, and the term “Ukrainian language” was widely used only in the 19th century.
2. The Ukrainian language was once called Cossack, Little Russian, as well as Ruthenian or Russian and even Kuban.
3. Ukrainian is one of the most widespread Slavic languages, the number of people who speak Ukrainian is about 45 million, it takes 26th place in the world.
4. Ukrainian literary language emerged in the late 18th century, after the publication of the Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s poem Eneyida (Ukrainian: Енеїда) in 1798, that was the first literary work in modern Ukrainian.
5. The folk song “Shchedryk” gained worldwide popularity. It has been performed many times in popular movies and TV shows, but not everyone knows that Carol of the bells is an English version of our Christmas song “Shchedryk”.
6. From 1918 to 1920, Ukrainian was the official language in the Kuban People’s Republic.
7. The Ukrainian language is rich in diminutive forms. Oddly, but even the word “enemies” has its own diminutive form.
8. Ukrainian has only three verbal tenses (past, present, and future) as distinct from English with its 12+ tenses, but get ready to learn a lot of grammatical endings, prefix and suffix rules, as well as numerous contexts of most words.
9. Lexically, the closest to Ukrainian is Belarusian (84% of common vocabulary), followed by Polish (70%), Serbo-Croatian (68%), Slovak (66%), and Russian (62%).
10. The longest palindrome in Ukrainian is words – «тартрат» and «ротатор», and the longest palindrome phrase – «Я несу гусеня».
11. According to the dictionary of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, there are more than 256,000 words in the Ukrainian language.
12. The most common letter in the Ukrainian alphabet is “П”, also the largest number of words begins with this letter. The letter “Ф” is the least used letter and most of the words that begin with this letter came to Ukrainian from other languages.
13. The Ukrainian language is very rich in synonyms. For example, the word “to beat” has 45 synonyms.
14. Taras Shevchenko poetry collection Kobzar has appeared in hundreds of editions with poems translated into 147 languages.
15. Ukrainian maintains semi-official status in the United States (Cook County, Illinois). About 5.5 million people live in this district. And the Ukrainian language was chosen as one of the most commonly used languages in the area.
