Replying to
@stevee
(post is on
page 1):
“@fryedom you're from ukraine? the war there seems to be dragging on, i hope it ends soon. but that's cool you have that background.are russian and ukrainian...”
@stevee Thanks for asking, very common question here!
russian and Ukrainian are as similar as any slavic, eastern european language can be. That is, we share the same language family, cyrillic writing system, some of the alphabet, and obviously because of russian imperialism and cultural influence that comes with it, lots of grammar rules and words. Still, the global impression that "russian and ukrainian are the same language" is a actually a widespread myth and yet another way russia controls the narrative when it comes to how Ukraine is perceived worldwide.
In reality, it would be more accurate to say that Ukrainian is really similar to Belarusian (84% overlap), Polish (70%), and Slovak (68%). For example, in terms of vocabular similarity , russian sits at a fourth place with a mere 62% of shared vocabulary (which still seems like a lot until you take a little bit of research, and find out that they're as similar to each other as Dutch and English, but there isn't this mass perception that those languages are identical).
Lemme throw some sentence at ya to show how different they sound and look
- English: I like this beautiful country
- Ukrainian: Мені подобається ця красива країна (Meni podobayet'sya tsya krasyva krayina)
- russian: Мне нравится эта красивая страна (Mne nravitsya eta krasivaya strana)
I think it's fair to say that even in five words you can see entirely different vocabulary roots ( like країна and страна for "country", or подобається and нравится for "like")
The main reason people believe this myth is due to centuries of forced russification and imperial control. russia aggressively suppressed the Ukrainian language for generations thus forcing its own tongue into schools, media, and daily life. Because of this... how do i say it... "historical dominance", most Ukrainians (like myself) grew up understanding and speaking russian. However, this understanding is entirely one-way, Ukrainians can easily understand russians, but in majority of cases a monolingual russian speaker listening to Ukrainian will be completely lost and unable to understand it.
So yeah, in reality, the way we talk, the melody of our speech, our music, and our rich history of literature are entirely distinct. I'd say, think of them as distant cousins and not variants of the same language
Anyone can wear the mask.
You could wear the mask.
