Languages and how people use them represent personal identities and the political and cultural histories of a community. Ukrainian and Russian, what people speak in Ukraine and why, and the linguistic complexities behind the videos and signs you’ve been seeing. What language do they speak in Ukraine? Ukrainian ukrainian jellied meat the official language of Ukraine.

It’s a Slavic language, which means it’s related to languages such as Russian, Czech, and Polish. If you’re an English speaker learning Ukrainian, the grammar will likely be complex at first, but there will also be some familiar features, too. One mostly unfamiliar feature is Ukrainian’s robust case system. This means that nouns change their form depending on what role they play in the sentence.

A number of languages have case systems, including Russian, Latin, German, and even English — though in English, we only mark case on a few words. The following table has just a few examples of how case works in Ukrainian. Here, “zhinka” is in the nominative case, which is the case used when a noun is the subject of a sentence. You use the instrumental case when you’re doing something with someone. Ukrainians often know Russian, but Russians don’t often know Ukrainian So while Ukrainian and Russian are distinct linguistically, there is an important asymmetry to be aware of: even though most Russians don’t know or understand Ukrainian because it’s a different language, most Ukrainians know and understand Russian. How different are Ukrainian and Russian? Before diving into the facts of these languages, we should take a moment to consider what people mean when they ask this question and what people are actually saying when they answer it.