ABSTRACT
East Slavic language with approx. 35 million speakers, primarily in the Ukraine, but also in other former Soviet republics, the eastern Balkans, and Canada. Ukrainian began to develop as a literary language at the end of the eighteenth century, before which the East Slavic recension of Old Church Slavic was used. The modern literary language has developed since 1918. Ukrainian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet with the additional characters ‹„’› (only in emigrant publications), ‹ï›. Ukrainian, Russian, and Belorussian have a high degree of mutual intelligibility.
