The Ukrainian Language: The Heroic Story of a Language That Just Won’t Quit

if ever there was a language of resilience it is ukrainian everyone from the tsars to stalin have tried to wipe ukrainian from the face of the earth they even banned this and this to try and silence the language forever which led to some dramatic protests meanwhile behind closed doors [Music] this is a survival story about a very delicate and beautiful language that had the courage to fight for his life ukrainian is a rich and extremely interesting language that comes from the very heart of eastern europe it's one of the slavic languages and is the official language of ukraine which is the second biggest country in the whole of europe ukrainian is also spoken in at least a dozen other countries as a mother tongue to this day it still has some archaic vocabulary of course which i will show you a little bit later on [Music] early medieval times there was a very prosperous state called kievan rus that is in this area here it was founded by scandinavian vikings but the whole area was full of slavic tribes who spoke various dialects somewhere between the 6th to mid 11th century a proto-ukrainian formed with its own features some of which still exist today like this for example it was based on the colloquial language from the capital kiev the people who could write used old church slavonic lots of which is still preserved in manuscripts and luckily for us full of clues about what the old language was like by the mid 12th century old spoken ukrainians started to differ from written slavonic kind of like how the romans started speaking vulgar latin while still using classical latin for writing we don't know exactly how the language sounded back then but it looked like this don't you just love ancient graffiti this is the second clue about how ancient ukrainians wrote over 7 000 graffiti messages survived from the 11th century but let's not get ahead of ourselves in the 13th century kievan roose was invaded by a mysterious and terrible foe who they'd never even heard of the mongols now the mongol invasion caused havoc the mother city kiev was burned to the ground and the east slavic people broke up and this had a huge impact on society but even when everything fell around them it is said that the ukrainians kept their language alive [Music] they had a strong tradition of folk songs and storytelling and even today ukrainians love singing most of their folk songs are either about love or saying goodbye and there are 200 000 of them well they'd be getting a lot of time to practice as you're about to see [Music] around the start of this 16th century the earliest grammars of old ukrainian appeared and the first ukrainian dictionary was written in 1596 meanwhile other things were going on bit by bit ukrainian was picking up foreign words from german settlers from turkic nomads and invaders and from the next countries that ruled them lithuania and poland a language variety called ruthenian develops and this is where modern ukrainian actually comes from polish also had an enormous influence on the language now just going on vocabulary the closest to ukrainian is belarusian and then followed after that polish slovak and russian but something terrible was on the way beginning in the 18th century the russian empire occupied ukraine tsar peter the first banned printing in ukrainian and all ukrainian church books were seized then zarpita ii made them rewrite all state books into russian when they were dead catherine ii continued this game what was the plan well it was to get everyone speaking russian of course it carried on and on teaching in the ukrainian language was bad schools were shut down they started teaching polish instead it's not really surprising that the old literary language was gone by the late 18th century we could have predicted that but ukrainians kept telling their own folk stories and singing their own songs the new literary language that would come later was based on these stories it just goes to show the power of storytelling and if you're enjoying the stories that i tell please like and subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications that way i can keep them coming your way there was is not and could not have been a separate little russian language in the 1800s there was a total crackdown on all things that ukrainian ukrainian literature was prohibited even the word ukrainian was banned and replaced with little russian teaching ukrainian in schools was banned until 1917. they even tried to replace the ukrainian alphabet with the latin alphabet but the madness doesn't stop there i'm afraid ukrainian stage performances were banned and if you were a musician well you weren't allowed to have ukrainian lyrics on your musical scores talk about drama leaders kept prohibiting the language but who's going to stop friends telling tales around a campfire and this is where the most popular poet comes in taras chefchenko was an outstanding ukrainian poet of the 19th century he and some friends started a secret political society he used to read his revolutionary poems and hand out copies until yep he was arrested and sentenced to 10 years of exile prohibited to write or paint but did he stop of course he didn't stop have you ever met a poet he's not going to stop he continued writing poetry in secret of course and chefchenko's writings were amazing he wrote with words that everyday people were using instead of the unnatural kind of language you normally saw in literature his work actually helped perfect ukrainian making it more beautiful so there's no wonder that people loved him [Music] meanwhile the russians now from the mid 19th to early 20th century the laws banning the ukrainian language came in never-ending waves you couldn't even give your baby a ukrainian name i'm not kidding finally during the 20th century things started looking up after world war one and the russian revolution of 1917 something big happened ukrainization the ukrainian soviet socialist republic formed in 1922 and once again the language was encouraged phew relief right but would it last well keep watching people grew independent and culture was revived ukrainian was in schools theaters newspaper cinema it was everywhere again and it spread fast it traveled as far as the far east in fact someone standardized the spelling dictionaries were published the literary standard was formed style and translation developed enormously you had to take a ukrainian language exam to get into university in fact you could even get fired from your job if you didn't speak ukrainian ukrainian became the language of the army law administration and education basically it was massive which is why this next part is so hard to believe ever heard of language famine well you're about to in 1933 stalin banned ukrainization and at this time things got violent i mean extremely violent it was a bad time to be a writer many people disappeared forever the man responsible for language reforms committed suicide because he was afraid that he'd either be executed or deported these were dark and confusing days but it was also a bad time to just be ukrainian during the great famine of 32-33 stalin's men confiscated the food of peasants and millions of people died it wasn't artificial famine because even eating itself was banned they were starving out the language along with the people the soviets trashed the dictionaries and made new ones and then this was banned what is this a letter so who bans a letter well the soviets did apparently all because it was unique to the ukrainian language banned letters banned words and banned grammatical forms but that is nothing compared to this next thing one night hundreds of blind folk musicians called cobsarts were invited to a musician's convention in the city late that night the singers were taken from the train cars to the edge of a forest where trenches had been dug waiting for them and well i think you know what happened next stalin you see tried everything to wipe out ukrainian music and the ukrainian language and this pattern didn't stop until 1991 and the whole time the linguists writers and scientists were fighting for the language many were imprisoned or killed and some brave rebels did crazy things that you wouldn't believe this man wrote a book of ukrainian synonyms while sitting in a prison camp but the most radical act against russification was by a guy called oleska he wrote close to a thousand leaflets containing protest quotes he left them scattered on a hill for people to find and then set himself on fire i mean talk about extreme acts of protest would you do that for your language and then came 1991 and what happened in 1991 what i will tell you in just a second but if you're enjoying this story so far well this whole channel here is full of stories about languages and language learning but stories don't stop with those things because here at story learning i actually teach languages through story too and the reason is that stories are the best way that i've found to learn any language because stories are how we learn naturally it's how we learn our first languages and we can use stories to learn a new language too which is exactly how i teach here and if you'd like to learn more about this i've put together a completely free story learning kit that shows you how to learn languages using the amazing power of stories so if you are curious check out the link below and claim your free story learning kit [Music] the champagne in 1991 finally ukraine became independent and ukrainian the only state language tons of new books were written and ukrainian movies were made and the letter it came back but the ukrainian language had taken a bit of a pasting certain things like urban slang hadn't had the chance to develop naturally something rather peculiar did develop instead though anyone know what that is well save that thought and then in 2019 a law was finally passed expanding the use of ukrainian yeah 2019. [Music] so i promise to tell you why ukrainian is considered to be one of the most beautiful languages of all it even has a reputation for sounding a little bit like bird song i don't know if it's all that singing they did back in the old days but you can put a ton of emotion into a ukrainian sentence it's possible to add lots of suffixes to a single word to create a whole range of intensity the more suffixes you add the stronger the emotion there's even a special set of suffixes used for negative connotations that means a way to make a word smaller and cuter like when you say kitty instead of cat in ukrainian even words like enemy have diminutive forms not totally sure they'll be using the diminutive form of that particular word at the moment now i can't tell you all the ways that they make the ukrainian language pretty but here is one more there are four different words for the word and 68 of ukrainians consider ukrainian to be their mother tongue there are various dialects and 15 sub dialects but the three major ones are northern south western and south eastern these differ mostly in pronunciation and vocabulary and are partly mutually intelligible now i asked if you knew about a peculiar thing that developed in the ukrainian language see if you can guess whether this right here is ukrainian or russian [Music] ukrainian grammar and pronunciation mixed with mostly russian words it's a linguistic phenomenon unique to ukraine and no it's not a creole it's just what happens when you are forbidden to speak your own language it's actually spoken by 15 to 20 of the population and writers sometimes use it to create a circle of trust between people i'm starting to really love and admire these ukrainian writers but listen to this dialect addicts [Music] ukrainian well that was a test recognize it from earlier it is a sub dialect that is considered archaic called transcarpathian and it has some hungarian in it of course and ain't just old geezers who speak this [Music] ukrainian is now the 26th most spoken native language in the world there are almost 50 million ethnic ukrainians worldwide including 37.5 million in ukraine and another eight or more million in russia and the former republic to the soviet union but wait till you hear this immigrants took their language around the world as immigrants tend to do so you might bump into speakers in the us canada argentina and brazil but meanwhile ukrainian was changing back home and what does that mean it means the ukrainians of brazil didn't know that the language was changing back home so they speak a 100 year old form of the language isn't that pretty cool i doubt it's just in brazil though it probably happened all over as for the us well ukrainian has a semi-official status there the biggest communities live in california new york illinois and pennsylvania now after all that i bet you are dying to know how the language actually works so here goes the ukrainian language well ukrainian is closely related to russian and belarusian and all three languages are partly mutually intelligible think of the similarities between spanish portuguese and italian it's a little bit like that now for the avoidance of doubt ukrainian and russian are different languages even though they often sound the same to western ears and what's also interesting to newcomers is that ukrainian words are actually closer to polish than they are to russian check these out [Music] ukrainian is a richly inflected language meaning word endings change depending on where they are in the sentence so that's really hard but the easy part is that you mostly pronounce the words the way that they are spelled that save you a bit of trouble now this is not a grammar video but here's the 30-second version of ukrainian grammar so word order is subject verb object like english but you can mix it up too in ukrainian sentences the important thing is the topic so first you say what the sentence is about the topic and then you give information about that thing the comment so topic comments one of the most basic constructions of meaning in all human language there are three genders masculine feminine and neuter bit like german ukrainian doesn't have any articles so there are no words like the or and then there's this strange thing oh romeo romeo when juliet says oh romeo the word o is called vocative case it's a way of addressing the person that you are speaking to it might be archaic in english but ukrainian still uses it which is pretty cool but that's just one of seven cases verbs have only three basic tenses present past and future but there are complex verbs of motion not to mention all of the verb conjugations ukrainian uses a cyrillic alphabet but its own version of a cyrillic alphabet so although a lot of letters are like russian there are also a few unique letters to represent ukrainian sounds there are 33 letters all together 20 are consonants 10 are vowels and 2 are semi-vowels one thing that kind of stands out as scary is these consonant clusters all these consonants stuck together we're not used to this really in english but ukrainian has plenty of these stress can occur on any syllable of a word two now about the banned letter that made a grand comeback well ironically the sound it makes doesn't actually exist in many ukrainian native words anymore you mostly hear it in old dialects you know after all that but the struggle was very real if you want to read ukrainian but haven't learned the cyrillic alphabet it is possible to find things written in the latin alphabet but why would you want to do that don't make all of this for nothing speaking of reading there are a few unpredictable stress patterns but mostly ukrainian has the easiest reading rules of all slavic languages which is good to know this means that whenever you see the letter o for example it will have the same sound it has in the alphabet now i heard a curious story nobody knows for certain how to write the word helicopter because there are three possible words for helicopter is this true i don't know let me know in the comments and after that eye-opening story i'm sure you are curious how hard is ukrainian to learn well the fsi foreign service institute in the u.s ranks ukrainian as a level three language so fairly difficult but not the most difficult all worth it of course so you can read the poetry of talas chefchenko now we will be donating 100 of the ad revenue from this video to charities supporting humanitarian causes in ukraine so if you'd like to help best thing you can do is share this video with your friends share it on social media encourage them to learn about the ukrainian language and culture the more views we get here the more we can donate lastly thank you so much to inner for her help and contributions to this video links to her channel and her own charity are in the description below so please go and subscribe to her channel before you leave and do donate if you can

Channel: Olly Richards

Views: 273,929

Keywords: language learning, how to learn a language, foreign languages, learn a language, learn languages, polyglot, learn a new language, languages, language, stories, storylearning, olly richards, ukrainian, ukrainian language, ukrainian history, ukrainian culture, learn ukrainian, ukrainian alphabet

Id: SyUdxD_mvy0

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022