Blogger-linguist Paul Jorgensen posted a video essay about differences between Ukrainian and Russian languages on his YouTube channel Langfocus.<\/p>\n
Jorgensen said that the misconception that the languages \u200b\u200bare almost identical could have been due to the fact that Russian is widespread in Ukraine, and Ukrainians are mostly fluent in both languages.<\/p>\n
J\u00f8rgensen said that people of Ukraine often speak in Surzhyk \u2014 a mixture of\u00a0Ukrainian\u00a0and\u00a0Russian\u00a0languages, which can erase the differences between them.<\/p>\n
“However, despite the sometimes unclear delineation between the two languages, standard Russian and standard Ukrainian are clearly distinct,” he said.<\/p>\n
He explains the historical origin of the Slavic languages \u200b\u200bfrom 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cRussian 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Jorgensen talked about the lexical, phonetic, grammatical affinities and differences between Ukrainian and Russian in specific examples.<\/p>\n