Ukrainian

When the language got the name Ukrainian

The name Ukraine is known from 1187, but it was not applied to the language until the mid-19th century. The Brotherhood of Sts Cyril and Methodius in Kyiv took an old word for the Cossack homeland, Ukrajina, for the nation and called the language Ukrajinsʹka mova. Yakiv Holovatsky listed Ukrainian language in 1849 as a variant name for Little Russian, and Taras Shevchenko praised the "splendid Ukrainian language" in a private letter of 1854. In Galicia the term appeared first in hyphenated forms in 1866 and 1871, and on its own in 1878.

What the Russian Empire banned

Ukrainian was barred from schools as a subject and a language of instruction in 1804. A decree of 1863 from the imperial interior ministry declared that a separate Little Russian language "never has been, is not, and never can be", and the secret Ems Ukaz that followed banned most Ukrainian books, public performances and lectures, even Ukrainian lyrics printed with sheet music. A looser period after 1905 ended with another ban in 1914. Austrian Galicia was freer, and after the 1860s most Ukrainian literary works were published there and smuggled east.

Which dialect became the literary standard

The earliest literary work in the modern vernacular is Ivan Kotlyarevsky's Eneyida of 1798, a burlesque on Virgil's Aeneid. He and Petro Artemovsky wrote in the south-eastern dialect of the Poltava, Kharkiv and southern Kyiv regions, and Shevchenko and Panteleimon Kulish built the literary language on it in the mid-19th century. Writers who moved to Galicia brought in Galician vocabulary for law, government, technology and science.

How the spelling was fixed and refixed

The Central Rada issued the first official spelling rules on 17 January 1918, and the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences approved fuller rules on 17 May 1919. The Kharkiv orthography of 1928 unified the alphabet. In 1933 a commission branded it nationalist and in five months produced a spelling that brought Ukrainian close to Russian and removed ґ. The 1960 edition was the standard until 1990; a revision approved on 14 November 1989 restored ґ. On 22 May 2019 the Cabinet of Ministers approved a new edition that revived some features of 1928.

What the census and surveys record

In the 2001 census, 67.5% of Ukraine's population named Ukrainian as their native language and 29.6% named Russian, and 87.8% were fluent in Ukrainian. In an August 2022 survey by Rating Group, 76% considered Ukrainian their native language, up from 57% in July 2012, and 51% spoke only Ukrainian at home, against 44% in February 2014.