Ukrainian is a Slavic language spoken in Ukraine. Ukrainian belongs to the East Slavic languages and is spoken in the area of the Ukrainian and Moldavian SSR, where it is the official language alongside Russian; these areas include the former Galicia, Volhynia and Podolia, which belonged to the Republic of Poland until 1939, and the former autonomous Karpato-Ukraine, which was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR in 1945. The majority (40 million) of Ukrainian speakers actually live in Ukraine, the rest (10 million) in the other areas mentioned. The most striking feature of Ukrainian is that e and o are stretched into closed syllables. This condition has only remained so in very few dialects: in other dialects these protracted sounds are seen changed into diphthongs and monophthongs with oe-, u or i-timbre. In most of Ukrainian (including written language) both sounds have become i. Until the time of Peter the Great (17th century), Church Slavonic was the written language, as with the Great Russians, and showed only sporadic Minor Russian phenomena. Later, Russian became the dominant written language.
List of Acronyms Related to Ukrainian
