Blogger-Linguist Explains Differences Between Russian and Ukrainian

Blogger-linguist Paul Jorgensen posted a video essay about differences between Ukrainian and Russian languages on his YouTube channel Langfocus.

Jorgensen said that the misconception that the languages ​​are almost identical could have been due to the fact that Russian is widespread in Ukraine, and Ukrainians are mostly fluent in both languages.

Jørgensen said that people of Ukraine often speak in Surzhyk — a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian languages, which can erase the differences between them.

“However, despite the sometimes unclear delineation between the two languages, standard Russian and standard Ukrainian are clearly distinct,” he said.

He explains the historical origin of the Slavic languages ​​from the ancient language of Kievan Rus’ and said that the subsequent history of the Mongolian influences on Russian and the influence of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on the Ukrainian and Belarusian define their different trajectories of development.

“Russian and Ukrainian share about 62 percent lexical similarity. I personally found this number surprisingly low. Ukrainian has a higher lexical similarity with Polish, Slovak and Belarusian than it does with Russian,” he said.

Jorgensen talked about the lexical, phonetic, grammatical affinities and differences between Ukrainian and Russian in specific examples.

“Russian and Ukrainian are very closely related languages that share a lot of similarities, but they also have a lot of differences. Some of them minor and some of them major, ”Jorgensen concludes.

Paul Jorgensen is a Canadian-born linguist who lives in Japan and conducts one of the world’s most popular language blogs on YouTube. Its channel is subscribed to 780 thousand users from all over the world. A video about the Ukrainian and Russian languages, released in August third, has now been viewed by almost 263,000 people.