Ukrainian has a Cyrillic alphabet almost identical to some other Slavonic languages (Russian, Bulgarian). Some of its letters look exactly like those of the Latin alphabet used in English; however, most of these are pronounced differently than in English and may in fact resemble other English sounds.

The language spoken by most of them is based on the Galician dialect of Ukrainian from the first half of the twentieth century. Compared with modern Ukrainian, the vocabulary of Ukrainians outside Ukraine reflects less influence of Russian, yet may contain Polish or German loanwords.

Vowels Ukrainian vowel chart, from Pompino-Marschall, Steriopolo & Żygis (2016 Ukrainian has the six vowel phonemes shown below. /ɪ/ is a retracted close-mid front vowel [ ɪ̞ ]. [1] Ukrainian has no phonemic distinction between long and short vowels; however, unstressed vowels are shorter and tend to be more centralized. [2] It has retained the two early Cyrillic letters і (i) and izhe (и) to represent related sounds /i/ and /ɪ/ as well as the two historical forms e (е) and ye (є). Its unique letters are the following: ge (ґ), used for the less-common velar plosive /ɡ/ sound, whereas in Ukrainian the common Cyrillic г represents a glottal fricative, /ɦ/. Britannica Quiz Languages & Alphabets This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper. Ukrainian language, East Slavic language spoken in Ukraine and in Ukrainian communities in Kazakhstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, and Slovakia and by smaller numbers elsewhere. If they speak Ukrainian or Belarusian they will for sure understand Russian. There are some simple tricks how to distinguish the other Slavic languages from Russian. For instance, in Ukrainian we don't have 'g' sound (in fact we have it, but there are only a few words with this sound), instead we use a sound which is more close to 'h'. 1L29.