Ukrainian

Ukrainian (українська мова ukrainska mova) is an East Slavic Indo-European language with ~40M L1 speakers, the official language of Ukraine, and sister to Russian and Belarusian within East Slavic. It descends from Old East Slavic of Kyivan Rus' (~9th-13th c. CE), with the modern literary standard codified through the 19th-c. national-romantic movement around Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) — whose Kobzar (1840) is considered the foundational text of Ukrainian literature — and Ivan Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, and the Galician Prosvita society. Written in a 33-letter Cyrillic alphabet (with Ukrainian-specific letters і, ї, є, ґ; and notable absence of Russian ы, ё, ъ); the apostrophe ʼ marks a hardening separator. Grammatically: 7 cases (vocative is preserved as a productive 7th case, in contrast to Russian), 3 grammatical genders, full nominal/adjectival/verbal inflection, and the same imperfective-perfective aspect pairing as Russian. Phonologically distinct from Russian: pronounced "i" where Russian has "y" (Ukrainian кіт kit "cat" vs. Russian кот kot), preserved palatalized "h" /ɦ/, no full vowel reduction (akanye/ikanye), and a more melodic intonation. Suppressed under Russification policies during the Russian Empire (Valuev Circular 1863, Ems Ukaz 1876) and Soviet era; experiencing revitalization since 1991 independence and especially since 2014.