Name used by its speakers (Endonym): Ukrayinska (Українська), or
Ukrayinska mova (українська мова)
Native speakers (estimated): 31 million
Total speakers, including second-language (estimated): 41 million
Where it’s spoken: Ukrainian is the sole national language of Ukraine, which is home to the majority of the world’s speakers. After the fall of the Soviet Union, independent Ukraine began to promote the Ukrainian language through government and schools. Within the country, the Ukrainian language has historically been more prevalent in western, central, and rural areas, while the Russian language was more common in Kyiv and other cities. However, a survey in 2022 (following the Russian invasion) reported that the numbers of people who spoke Ukrainian at home (85%), or considered it their native language (76%), were on the increase, even among members of the ethnic Russian minority.1
Ukrainian is recognized as a minority language in many neighboring countries due to historical spread of ethnic Ukrainians, as well as changing national boundaries over time. These include Russia, Belarus, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Russia is home to the largest number of Ukrainians (3 million) and Ukrainian speakers (over 1 million), while the second-largest Ukrainian community abroad lives in Poland (2 million).
Significant Ukrainian communities have also been established in other countries via emigration during the 20th century, particularly in Canada and the United States (over 1 million each), Brazil (600,000), and Argentina (305,000), though the majority of these individuals have become assimilated to the local majority language. The largest Ukrainian-American population is located in New York City, with other sizeable communities in Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Cleveland. In the small city of Prudentópolis, the center of the Brazilian Ukrainian community, both Portuguese and Ukrainian are official languages.
Most recently, the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia has led to a wave of mass exodus within Europe, with over 6.7 million Ukrainians being displaced as refugees according to the United Nations, the largest such crisis since World War II. The majority of these have taken refuge in nearby European countries, particularly Russia, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Moldova, but large numbers have also been relocated to the UK, Spain, Italy and elsewhere across Western Europe, and there are over 500,000 Ukrainian refugees outside of Europe.2
Language family: Indo-European, Slavic (or Balto-Slavic) branch. It is the third most spoken Slavic language, after Russian and Polish.
Related languages include: Belarusian and Russian have the highest degree of mutual intelligibility with Ukrainian, together constituting the East Slavic group. The South Slavic languages (including Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian) and the West Slavic languages (including Czech and Polish) have variable degrees of similarity in vocabulary, grammar, and literary style, influenced by centuries of mutual interaction.
1 “Seventeenth National Survey: Identity. Patriotism. Values (17–18 August 2022)”. Rating Group. 23 August 2022.
2 https://unric.org/en/ukraine-over-6-million-refugees-spread-across-europe/