I don’t think it can properly be called a dialect of German. It’s certainly a Germanic language, and to a large extent it’s mutually intelligible with German, or at least was when Yiddish was still widely spoken by the Jewish community in Germany and Germans were exposed to it on a daily basis. But it draws heavily from Hebrew in vocabulary (and has, in turn, passed on Hebrew words into German, where some of them are still used colloquially).
I haven’t had a ton of exposure to it, really, and it’s hard to say because most of the Ukrainian speakers I have been exposed to are also Russian speakers. So I really haven’t had to do any of those things. (I did go to one of the anti-Russian invasion demonstrations, and there were a ton of Ukrainians there, obviously - Chicago has a bunch. But most of the non-English conversations I overheard there were either in Russian, or in Ukrainian that was essentially indistinguishable from Russian.) I did try listening to one of Zelenskyy’s speeches on his Facebook page, and I can understand enough of the subject matter to follow along.
Isn’t Zelenskiyy himself a native speaker of Russian?
Yep, but his speeches have been in Ukrainian, for fairly obvious reasons (except the one addressed to the people of Russia).
What I meant was that if Zelenskiyy grew speaking Russian, then switched to Ukrainian because of his career in Ukraine, then his personal usage of Ukrainian will presumably be relatively close to Russian.
Right, but there are definitely enough vocabulary and usage differences that it would be difficult for a speaker of another Slavic language to understand fully, even a native speaker without prior exposure. Honestly I have an easier time understanding most Polish dialects, because I have been exposed to more native Polish speakers, than I have understanding Ukrainian. There are hundreds of thousands of native Polish speakers where I live, so I hear it spoken all the time. There were three at a previous workplace with ~ 50 people, just to give you an idea. Chicago has a fair number of Ukrainian speakers, too, but it’s not even close.
(And there’s a fair amount of dialect variation in both Polish and Ukrainian. When I worked at Immigration Court, there were 2 regular Polish interpreters. The one from Warsaw, I understood ~ 70% of the time, but the one from the mountains in the south of Poland, maybe 30%. And that was with familiar subject matter.)
Ah, yes, the Góral accents in south Poland. I grew up around those (my dad is from Zakopane; he has a city accent, but many of his friends speak to various degrees in this manner.) It’s almost like Scots to RP English.
I was hoping you’d pop in!
Some Russians argue this. Certainly not all of them. (And of course many non-Russians also cleave to this viewpoint. It often depends on where one’s political affinities lie.)
Linguists (that is, people who study language from a scientific perspective) tend to avoid politicizing questions of language.
My partner speaks Russian but not Ukrainian. She has been dealing with the local Ukrainian embassy to help get some refugees out of the country and resettled in Austria. According to her, the embassy staff can speak Russian, but refuse to do so. So they speak Ukrainian to her, she answers in Russian, and this arrangement works perfectly fine for communication.
My father’s first language was Yiddish (although he was US born) and he was able to carry on a limited conversation with a German. On the other hand, I rather doubt that a Plattdeutsch speaker would have any luck speaking to a Swiss, assuming neither spoke standard Hochdeutsch.
Quite right. I should have been more specific that it’s a position advocated by some Russians. From earlier reading back when the USSR still existed, I understand that was the official government line, and I believe it’s been taken up since by Russians of a certain political position, but not all Russians. Apologies for the généralisation.
Again, I should have been more specific. I understand that the linguistic analysis tends to support those who make the political arguments relating to Ukrainian being a separate language from Russian.
Years ago, I had to accompany a client to the local Ukrainian consulate. She had left Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was a small child, but suddenly needed a Ukrainian passport for a work trip because she hadn’t naturalized in the U.S. yet. Her native language was Russian, not Ukrainian, and the consular staff was…unhelpful, to say the least. When she asked for an application form for a new passport, they told her that it was on their website, in Ukrainian, so she could read it herself. But that in any case, the application had to be sent back to Ukraine, and so she wasn’t going to get her passport in time for her trip anyway.
I suspect (and hope) that that experience finally motivated her to naturalize.