How closely related are Ukrainian and Russian?

Just reading the National Geographic article on Ukraine, which mentions that there’s a split between the Ukrainian speaking Ukrainians in the western part of the country, and the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern portion.

How similar are the two languages? I seem to recall that at one point during the Soviet regime the official party line was that Ukrainian was simply a dialect of Russian, not a separate language. I assume that was simply the party propaganda, but it got me to wondering - could someone who only speaks Ukrainian be able to converse in any way with a Russian speaker?

The Eastern Ukrainian is closer to Russian. The Western Ukrainian is closer to Polish. My mother’s side of the family came from what is now Western Ukraine. My grandmother told me that the family spoke Yiddish and Polish.

My family comes from western Ukraine. During WWII, my Uncle Joe, who was raised speaking the western dialect at home in the US, was sufficiently able to understand Russian that he served as an ad-hoc interpreter for his unit when they linked up with Russian forces in Germany.
For the record, my family and people of similar background here in Pennsylvania never described themselves as speaking Ukrainian when I was a kid. They would tell you, most commonly, that they spoke Slovak or, much less commonly, Slavish. A more educated fellow like the parish priest might have told you what they spoke was “lower Russian.”

Well, the official party line said a great many things, occasionally including a bit of truth to throw people off.

Ukrainian is a quite distinct language, bordering on mutual intelligibility with Russian. Along with White Russian (Belarussian, the language of Belarus), they constitute “East Slavic,” one of three branches of the Slavic family.

With English as far distinct as it is from other languages (excluding Lallans Scots if you accept that as a distinct language), it’s very hard to convey the degree of distinction here. But suppose yourself to be fluent in Spanish and faced with Portuguese – you would understand the gist of what was said or written, but with a lot of nuance.

Extreme western Ukraine – the area around Lviv and Transcarpathia – was historically part of Poland and the dialect there has a heavy Polish admixture in vocabulary and idiom, as hajario notes. But the basic language structure is more akin to Russian and Belarussian than to the West and South Slavic languages.

Yup. Lviv (Lemburg at the time) was the nearest big city to the towns from where my maternal relatives came.

Northern, you live in Saskatchewan, and you’re trying to learn about Ukrainian on a message board? What’s become of the world? :wink:

I have a couple of office-mates, one Russian, one Ukranian, who converse amongst themselves each in their respective languages (both also know English, and use it with anyone else). So based on that, I’m going to say that they’re reasonably close.

I am a native speaker of Russian, and have no problem understanding Ukrainian either in spoken or written form. There are definitely differences in words, and there are minor differences in the alphabets, but the two are mutually intelligible, though with a little effort involved.

Indeed. If you read about the Curzon Line, you’ll see that it’s a very mixed area around Poland in general. In the east, the border with Ukraine has shifted and in the West the border with Germany has moved around. The wiki link I gave has a nifty little map that makes it pretty clear, once you read the explanation.

The best way I ever heard it explained is that there isn’t really a strict division a lot of the time between Russian/Polish/Ukrainian; if you ignore the alphabet issue, they really form a sort of dialectical continuum, with the Ukrainian spoken in Eastern Ukraine sounding much more like Russian, and in Western Ukraine sounding much more like Polish. It’s generally easier for a Russian speaker to understand eastern Ukrainian dialects than western Ukrainian ones.

Heck, the same thing happens in Polish; I speak Russian, and used to work with 2 Polish interpreters. Sometimes if it was slow I would sit in and listen to them work; I could understand about 70 - 80% of what the one from Warsaw was saying, but maybe 10 - 20% of what the one from the Carpathian Mountains was saying.

True, but there’s not as many Russian speakers here to do the comparison test. One makes do.

See if this gives you some idea…



#	Russian		Ukrainian	Belarusian
1	odin		odin		anzin
2	dva		dva		dva	
3	tri		tri		try
4	chetyre		chotiri		chatyry
5	pyat'		p"yat'		pyats'
6	shest'		shist'		shests'
7	sem'		sim		sem
8	vosem'		visim		vosem
9	devyat'		dev"yat'	dzevyats'
10	desyat'		desyat'		dzesyats'

Not really. As someone with an extensive knowledge of linguistics, I’m sure you know that words for the cardinal numbers are often among the most conservative words in a language. You could hardly pick a worse group of words to demostrate the similarity or difference between two languages.

OK, you want different, compare the words for ‘eye’:
Russian - glaz
Ukrainian - oko; zir; pohlyad
Belarusian - voka

But doesn’t it also depend on whether those words are used, or maybe just heard, but speakers of the other language? We’ve had several native speakers say that the two languages are mutually intelligible. It’s my understanding that the Slavic languages (at least of the easter and western branches) are fairly similar. The languages of the southern branch are isolated from those of the other two branches, and differ more from their western and eastern kin.

When did the various Slavic languages start to differentiate? I thought it was fairly recently, compared to, say, the Germanic languages.