Article 10 of the Basic Law of this country declares that "the state language in Ukraine is Ukrainian." At the same time, the Constitution acts as the guarantor of the free development, use and protection of Russian and other languages of national minorities living in the country.
Some statistics and facts
- Ukrainian, according to the last official census of 2001, is considered native only by 67.5% of the population. Most of the speakers of Ukrainian live in Volynska - 93%, Ivano-Frankivsk - 97, 8% and Ternopil - 98, 3% of the population.
- The most Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine were traditionally considered Luhansk, Donetsk and Kharkiv regions. 68, 8%, 74, 9% and 44, 3% of residents prefer to communicate there in Russian, respectively.
- The Odessa region is home to 46, 3% of speakers of Ukrainian, 41, 9% of speakers of Russian, and approximately equal shares of ethnic Moldovans and Bulgarians.
- 12, 7% of the inhabitants of Transcarpathia are native speakers of the Hungarian language.
- According to an independent survey conducted in 2011, 92% of Ukrainians speak Russian fluently, and 86% of Russian-speaking residents of the republic speak the state language of Ukraine.
History and modernity
Together with Russian and Belarusian, the Ukrainian language belongs to the East Slavic language group. It was formed on the basis of Old Russian dialects, and in the history of literary Ukrainian there are two main periods. The origin began in the XIV century and lasted for about four centuries, and in the XVIII century the modern version of the Ukrainian language appeared.
Among those who played an important role in the development and formation of the state language of Ukraine are the prominent writers and public figures I. P. Kotlyarevsky and T. G. Shevchenko.
In addition to being official at home, Ukrainian received the status of a national minority language in Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, Romania and a number of other countries where its speakers are densely settled.
The vocabulary of the language is formed by the Proto-Slavic lexical fund, words of Old Russian origin and Ukrainian expressions proper. All dialects of Ukrainian are grouped into southwestern, northern and southeastern groups. The base of the written language is the Ukrainian alphabet based on the Cyrillic alphabet.
According to various sources, up to 45 million native speakers of Ukrainian live in the world, and they can be found absolutely on all inhabited continents and in almost any country in the world.
