Ukrainian is not ‘almost Russian’: why its history leads to Belarusian, Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew — and what the ‘Kyiv Letter’ preserved

Ukrainian and Russian languages are indeed related, but they are two independent languages. Moreover, in one of the most frequently cited systems of lexical comparison, Ukrainian shares more common vocabulary with Belarusian, Polish, and Slovak than with Russian. However, for the Israeli reader, the story becomes even more interesting if we go beyond the usual pair “Ukrainian — Russian”: for centuries, Yiddish lived alongside Ukrainian, with words and even grammatical models passing through it in both directions, and ancient Hebrew texts preserved one of the earliest attestations of the very name Kyiv. Today, this old linguistic triangle Ukraine — Yiddish — Hebrew works again, but now through books, universities, music, and direct translations.

Author: Lev Varshavsky

For a person who grew up in the USSR or in the large “Soviet-Russian-speaking” Israeli aliyah, the Ukrainian language often seems deceptively familiar. The Cyrillic script is almost the same, some words are instantly recognizable, and a huge number of older generation Ukrainians freely understand Russian and often speak it without a noticeable accent.

From this, a too simple conclusion was drawn for decades: therefore, Ukrainian is almost Russian, and the differences between them are not particularly great. Linguistics shows a different picture. The kinship of languages, the amount of common vocabulary, the similarity of grammar, the same script, and the real ability of two specific people to understand each other are related but still different parameters.

It is from this difference that one should start.

Relatives — yes. One language — no

Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian belong to the East Slavic languages. Their kinship is real and deep, but modern linguistics considers Ukrainian as a separate linguistic system with its own phonetics, morphology, vocabulary, dialects, and literary norm. The historical development of this norm took place on both sides of state borders: in the 19th — first half of the 20th century, Ukrainian lands were divided between the Russian and Austrian Empires, and later also Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR; therefore, there were eastern and western traditions of standardization, which over time converged.

Thus, both extremes are erroneous. Ukrainian is not a “spoiled Russian,” but there is also no reason to portray it as a language almost unrelated to Russian. A common ancestor and centuries of neighborhood have left a huge number of common features.

In this, Ukrainian is completely ordinary. English and German are relatives, French and Italian are relatives, Swedish and Danish are relatives. Kinship does not imply that one modern language is a variety of another.

What 84%, 70%, 68%, and 62% really mean

A widely cited estimate associated with the works of Ukrainian linguist Konstantin Tishchenko gives the following sequence of lexical proximity to Ukrainian: approximately 84% common vocabulary with Belarusian, 70% with Polish, 68% with Slovak, and 62% with Russian. These figures are reproduced in modern academic publications.

But “62%” is not a test for everyday understanding. It does not mean that a Russian person will necessarily understand 62 words out of a hundred spoken by a Ukrainian. The result depends on the set of compared vocabulary, the definition of related words, the consideration of borrowings, dialect, and the methodology itself; even academic descriptions separately warn that percentages may change depending on the region and corpus.

Therefore, it is especially unfortunate to turn these numbers into a universal ruler and write that “Ukrainian and Russian differ exactly as French and Portuguese.” Percentages obtained by different studies for different language families cannot be mechanically superimposed on each other.

But within one methodology, the numbers show an important thing: Ukrainian cannot be described solely as an appendix to Russian. Its lexical history is closely connected with Belarusian, Polish, Slovak, and other languages of Central-Eastern Europe.

Why “місто”, “шукати” and “дякую” are more important than bare percentages

This is easier to see in everyday words. Ukrainian місто — city; nearby Polish miasto and Slovak mesto, while Russian uses “город”. Ukrainian шукати is comparable to Belarusian шукаць and Polish szukać, Russian says “искать”.

Ukrainian дякую is easily recognizable next to Polish dziękuję and Belarusian дзякуй. Праця is close to Polish praca, while in Russian it is “работа” or “труд”.

And in a few seconds, the situation turns around. Water, hand, brother, sister, earth, winter, and a huge number of other words immediately show the common Slavic heritage.

Therefore, a Russian-speaking person can read a Ukrainian sentence almost effortlessly, then stumble upon four completely opaque words, and understand the next sentence again. This is not a peculiarity and not proof of one language being “spoiled” by another — this is how closely related independent languages normally interact.

Why Ukrainian is so close to Belarusian and Polish

The modern state map poorly explains the history of the language. Large territories of present-day Ukraine were for centuries in a common political and cultural space with Belarusian and Polish lands — in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; Galicia later developed in the Habsburg Monarchy.

People traded, studied, served, married, moved, and state borders often moved around them. At the same time, languages contacted not only through the court and administration but at the market, in the workshop, church, tavern, and neighboring yard.

As a result, Ukrainian interacted with Polish and Belarusian for centuries, and in different regions — also with German, Hungarian, Romanian, Crimean Tatar, Yiddish, and other languages. That is why modern Ukrainian cannot be divided into two boxes: “its own” and “Russian”.

Its history is much more layered.

Cyrillic creates a false sense of almost complete similarity

Russian and Ukrainian visually seem very close simply because both use Cyrillic. Polish is written in Latin script and therefore is psychologically perceived as further away, even when a specific Polish word turns out to be closer to Ukrainian than its Russian equivalent.

But the alphabets of Russian and Ukrainian are not identical. Ukrainian has і, ї, є, ґ, which are absent in modern Russian; Russian has ы, э, ё, ъ, which are not in the Ukrainian alphabet.

Familiar letters also work differently. Ukrainian г in standard speech usually denotes the sound [ɦ], while for [g] there is ґ. The systems of vowels and consonants, word forms, and a whole range of grammatical habits differ; for example, in Ukrainian, there is a fully functional vocative case — мамо, Олено, Андрію.

Therefore, written Ukrainian is often noticeably easier for a Russian speaker than normal fast spoken speech.

The main paradox: why Ukrainians understand Russian better than Russians understand Ukrainian

Here, the everyday impression especially strongly diverges from the structure of the language.

Most Ukrainians of the Soviet and post-Soviet generations had a huge amount of contact with Russian: television, cinema, army, books, higher education, work, all-Union institutions, mixed families. Even a person from a completely Ukrainian-speaking home could hear Russian almost every day.

Therefore, they acquired passive proficiency in the second language, even if they never specifically studied it.

The Cambridge University Press textbook uses the Ukrainian-Russian example to explain asymmetric mutual intelligibility: most Ukrainian speakers, due to constant exposure to Russian, understand it without serious problems, while the average Russian, who has little contact with Ukrainian, may understand only fragments of Ukrainian speech.

An Israeli can easily understand this mechanism. An immigrant from Kyiv or Moscow, after twenty years in Israel, may perfectly understand both Russian and Hebrew; this says nothing about the kinship of Russian and Hebrew. It speaks about the person’s biography.

Therefore, the statement “all Ukrainians I met understood Russian” proves only one thing: these Ukrainians knew Russian.

Why Russian got such a big head start in Ukraine

The historical context here cannot be removed either.

In the Russian Empire, the Valuev Circular of 1863 severely restricted Ukrainian printing, especially religious and educational publications. The Ems Ukaz of 1876 went further: it restricted the publication and import of Ukrainian books, public readings, theatrical performances, and other forms of language use. The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute considers the history of these restrictions as a key part of the history of the status of the Ukrainian language.

After the revolution, the policy changed. In the 1920s, Ukrainization sharply expanded the space of Ukrainian education, science, and press; later, the course was reversed, and Russian gained much greater weight as the language of a union career, army, interregional communication, and a significant part of mass culture.

Hence the asymmetry. A Ukrainian had to know Russian much more often than a resident of the RSFSR had to know Ukrainian.

Surzhyk: not a “sub-language,” but the result of long contact

A separate product of this history is surzhyk, that is, various mixed Ukrainian-Russian forms of speech. It is not one strictly fixed system: surzhyk of Poltava, Odessa region, or a specific family may look different.

Modern corpus research in Russian Linguistics shows that surzhyk is used by millions of people and is not necessarily a chaotic set of random words. In some regions, researchers see stable preferences and signs of stabilization of mixed speech.

For Israel, the example is again literally around us. The Russian speech of immigrants has long absorbed “mazgan,” “kupat holim,” “bituach,” “iriya,” “teudat zehut,” and Hebrew roots are regularly turned into Russian verbs and endings.

The presence of such a mixture does not turn Russian and Hebrew into one language. The same principle applies to Ukrainian and Russian.

At NANovosti, we have already separately analyzed why the historical Russian-speaking nature of Ukrainian Jews is not equal to Russian identity. “Ukrainian Jews historically spoke Russian. The war is changing this”

And here Yiddish appears

If you look at Ukrainian only through Russian, a huge piece of its real history is lost. For several centuries, alongside Ukrainian on the territories of present-day Ukraine, there was another massive everyday language — Yiddish.

For part of the Israeli audience, it is necessary to clarify the obvious here: Yiddish and Hebrew are not two varieties of one language. Hebrew belongs to the Semitic languages, Yiddish to the Germanic. Yiddish formed on a Germanic basis, contains a large ancient Hebrew-Aramaic component, and is written in Hebrew script, while in Eastern Europe it absorbed a powerful Slavic layer.

Before the Holocaust of European Jewry, Yiddish was not “a language somewhere nearby” on the territory of Ukraine, but the language of family, trade, press, literature, theater, religious and urban life. That is why one of the recent Ukrainian discussions received at first glance a provocative but historically understandable title — “Yiddish as a Ukrainian language”: not in terms of genealogy, of course, but in terms of a language deeply rooted in Ukrainian soil. NANovosti wrote separately about the discussion at the Book Arsenal.

Recently, we returned to this topic in a large material “Yiddish — a language rooted in Ukrainian soil”, where researcher Tetyana Nepypenko explains why the Ukrainian history of Yiddish cannot be reduced to museum nostalgia.

How much Ukrainian really changed Yiddish

Here the influence turned out to be much deeper than a few borrowed words.

Professor Wolf Moskovich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem writes that Ukrainian-Yiddish contact lasted about five centuries and left a mark in the phonetics, morphology, syntax, vocabulary, and phraseology of Yiddish. According to him, by the end of the 19th century, about 30% of the world’s Jewry lived on ethnographic Ukrainian territories; in Western and Right-Bank Ukraine, Jews constituted a significant part of the population, and in a number of towns and shtetls — a relative majority.

He also provides an almost laboratory indicator of the scale of contact. The first Yiddish dictionary in the Russian Empire, published by Shiye-Mordkhe Lifshits in Zhytomyr in 1876, contained 280 Ukrainian borrowings; the list compiled by K. F. Lyubarsky in Odessa in 1927 already numbered about 500, and Moskovich emphasizes that the real number was higher.

In southeastern, or Ukrainian, Yiddish, Ukrainian influence even penetrated grammar. Encyclopedia of Ukraine provides a very illustrative example with verb aspect — that is, the distinction between the process itself and the completed action. In Ukrainian, this is a fundamental category: roughly писати — написати, “to write — to have written.” In Yiddish, under Slavic influence, a similar opposition appeared: ikh hob geshribn — “I wrote / I have written” and ikh hob ongeshribn — already with a shade of completion: “I finished writing, completed the writing.” For the Middle High German basis of Yiddish, such a model was not original — it formed in the Eastern European Slavic environment.

Similarly, prefixes that change the way or result of an action became active in Yiddish. The Jewish Languages Project separately points to the prefix tse- as an example of a verb aspect system semantically formed under strong Slavic influence. The principle is very familiar to a Ukrainian-speaking person: the prefix does not just create a new word, but specifies whether the action began, lasted, repeated, or was brought to a result.

Ukrainian influence is also noticeable in function words. In Ukrainian Yiddish, forms like i… i — “and… and / both… and”, take — “indeed, exactly so”, nu — the very “nu” that has become one of the most recognizable particles of Eastern European Yiddish. Encyclopedia of Ukraine directly links the penetration of many such conjunctions, prepositions, and adverbs with the Ukrainian linguistic environment.

There is also a phonetic example. In Eastern Yiddish, the characteristic regressive voicing of consonants for Slavic languages operates: a sound can change under the influence of the following voiced consonant. The Jewish Languages Project provides the form fus + benkl → fu[z]benkl: the voiceless s before the voiced b turns into z. For a person familiar with Ukrainian or another Slavic phonetics, the mechanism itself is quite recognizable.

Even more noticeable is the influence in word formation. The Slavic suffix -nik entered Yiddish: for example, nudnik — “a bore, an annoying person,” from nudne — “boring, tedious.” Diminutives -ke and -tshik also took root. The Ukrainian habit of forming emotionally colored diminutives even affected Jewish names: Encyclopedia of Ukraine provides Moyshenyu and Khayimke — diminutives of Moishe and Chaim.

A separate layer is verbs denoting a very specific way of action. Slavic forms like shushken — “to whisper,” kvitshen — “to squeal, to scream piercingly,” mlien — “to languish, to simmer slowly” were borrowed into Yiddish. Moreover, these verbs not only entered the vocabulary but formed a separate morphological class in Yiddish.

The same happened with kinship terms. In Eastern Yiddish, zeyde — “grandfather,” bobe — “grandmother,” plemenik — “nephew” were fixed. Encyclopedia of Ukraine separately provides zayde as a word related to Ukrainian дід, as well as Ukrainian borrowings like khrayn — “horseradish” and nudnik, related to Ukrainian нудний.

Therefore, the expression “Ukrainian influenced Yiddish” cannot be understood as a dozen words brought from the market. The contact affected pronunciation, verb aspect, prefixes, word formation, diminutive forms, function words, and entire classes of verbs. Researcher Wolf Moskovich therefore speaks of the impact of Ukrainian on all levels of Yiddish — from phonetics to syntax and phraseology.

That is, the Yiddish of a Jew from Berdychiv, Uman, Zhytomyr, or Podolia was a Germanic language — but a Germanic language that lived for several generations within a Slavic sound and grammatical environment.

“Mezinke,” “-nik” and the Ukrainian trace that went to America and Israel

There are especially vivid examples. The Yiddish mezinke / mezinik, denoting the youngest child in the family, is usually associated with Ukrainian мізинець — little finger, and figuratively the smallest. Later, mezinke was fixed in the name of the Ashkenazi wedding custom.

Through the Slavic environment, Yiddish adopted productive word formation models like -nik, diminutives -ke, -tshik, as well as a large layer of Slavic verbs. The Jewish Languages Project lists verbs with meanings “to whisper,” “to scream,” “to simmer slowly” among such borrowings.

This is an important nuance: not every Slavicism in Yiddish can be confidently declared specifically Ukrainian. Ukrainian, Polish, and Belarusian have been in contact with each other for centuries, so for some words, it is impossible to establish a precise single donor.

But the existence of a specifically Ukrainian dialectal space of Yiddish and the scale of Ukrainian influence are beyond doubt.

And what Yiddish gave to Ukrainian

The reverse movement was also noticeable.

Moskovich writes about numerous Yiddish borrowings and calques in Ukrainian regional dialects and urban sociolects. Especially rich material was preserved in Galicia, Bukovina, Podolia, Volhynia, Odessa, and other territories of intensive Ukrainian-Jewish neighborhood.

In Ukrainian colloquial speech, words related to trade, crafts, urban life, and emotional speech were fixed. Among the often discussed examples are ґешефт, ґвалт, цимес, шабаш, махлювати, хохма and other forms.

But etymology here requires caution. One word could have an ancient Hebrew root, come into Yiddish, acquire Ashkenazi pronunciation, then pass through Polish or Ukrainian urban speech. Another could be Germanic in origin but enter Ukrainian precisely through Yiddish.

Therefore, the expression “Jewish word” is almost always too crude. The history of a specific word sometimes resembles the route of a family through five borders.

Hebrew occupies a different place in this story

With Hebrew, the picture is fundamentally different. “Ukrainian Language. Encyclopedia” notes that direct borrowings from ancient Hebrew into Ukrainian are relatively few; the oldest path often looked like ancient Hebrew → Greek → Old Church Slavonic → Ukrainian, and a later layer partially went through Yiddish.

Therefore, Ukrainian амінь, алілуя, месія, сатана, серафим, херувим, манна, Едем ultimately have ancient Hebrew origins, but this is not a trace of a casual conversation of a Ukrainian peasant with a neighbor speaking Hebrew. This is primarily the path of biblical and church literature.

Another layer is already more closely related to Jewish life: кошерний, маца, рабин, Тора, хедер, меламед, шамес and similar vocabulary. Some of these words came through Yiddish.

A good example is шабаш: Ukrainian linguistic reference books directly cite it as a borrowing through Yiddish from an ancient Hebrew source. The chain is Hebrew → Yiddish → Ukrainian.

And in modern times, a direct Israeli layer arises — кібуц, Кнесет and other words related to the modern State of Israel.

Did Ukrainian influence modern Hebrew

Here it is necessary not to exaggerate. The direct impact of Ukrainian on modern public Israeli Hebrew is incomparable to its influence on Ukrainian Yiddish.

The reason is simple. For most of the history of Ashkenazi communities in Eastern Europe, Hebrew was primarily the language of religious text, education, writing, and part of intellectual life; the everyday family language was Yiddish.

Therefore, Ukrainian influence first entered Yiddish. Then regional Yiddish phonetics influenced Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew, and already together with the bearers of these traditions, part of the speech habits were transferred to Palestine and Israel.

It is most accurate here to say not “Ukrainian changed Hebrew,” but about the chain Ukrainian environment → Ukrainian Yiddish → regional Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew → linguistic baggage of part of the future speakers of modern Hebrew.

This is how real linguistic history usually works: not in a straight line, but through people.

Kyiv letter: when Hebrew preserves the history of a Ukrainian toponym

And now the story takes a completely unexpected turn. Hebrew documents are important not only because they gave Ukrainian separate words: they became a source for studying the history of the Ukrainian linguistic space itself.

Encyclopedia of Ukraine notes that a recommendation letter from the Jewish community of Kyiv in the first half of the 10th century contains the first known fixation of the name Kyiv. Later, especially from the 16th–17th centuries, rabbinic responsa and Jewish chronicles increasingly recorded Ukrainian geographical names, although the use of Hebrew script without full vowel designation limits the possibilities of accurate phonetic reconstruction.

NANovosti told in detail about this document in a separate material on “Kyiv letter”. It was discovered by Norman Golb among the materials of the Cairo Geniza; the document is associated with the Kyiv Jewish community of the 10th century, and the name of the city is conveyed in Hebrew script. “Kyiv letter” of the 10th century and the ancient Jewish community of Kyiv

This is a wonderful example of how meaningless it is to separate the history of Ukraine and Jewish history into two hermetic shelves. Sometimes one of the oldest traces of a Ukrainian city is literally stored inside a Jewish text.

Sambatas: another ancient name of Kyiv and a cautious hypothesis

There is another curious plot. In the Byzantine treatise of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus “On the Administration of the Empire” of the 10th century, the name Sambatas appears next to Kyiv.

The origin of this name remains the subject of discussions. One of the hypotheses connects it with the Jewish legendary Sambation — a river featured in Jewish tradition; such a connection cannot be considered a proven generally accepted etymology.

NANovosti separately analyzed this Judaic version and the arguments around it. Sambatas, Kyiv and possible connection with the Sambation river

For our topic, this plot is important not as a sensation about “the Jewish origin of Kyiv,” but as a reminder: Kyiv of the 10th century was in a much more complex international, trade, and linguistic network than sometimes imagined by modern national imagination.

Why did Ukrainian Jews then massively switch to Russian

If Ukrainian and Yiddish had been in close contact for centuries, a logical question arises: why by the 20th century did a huge part of Ukraine’s Jews become Russian-speaking?

The answer is related to the social and political hierarchy of languages. In the Russian Empire, and later in the USSR, Russian provided access to state education, urban careers, universities, and a broad cultural environment. For many Jewish families, the transition seemed like social modernization: from Yiddish to Russian.

After the Holocaust, Soviet repressions against Jewish culture, the closure of Yiddish institutions, and further urbanization, this process accelerated sharply. In Soviet Ukraine, Yiddish gradually lost its everyday environment, while Russian strengthened.

That is why a Russian-speaking Ukrainian Jew at the end of the 20th century is a completely ordinary phenomenon. But their language does not negate the Ukrainian origin of the family or the earlier Yiddish layer.

On NANews, this story is traced in detail, for example, in the material about the first Passover Haggadah in Ukrainian, where the transition from Russian to direct Ukrainian-Jewish language interaction becomes part of modern culture. First Passover Haggadah in Ukrainian

Today the old connection has become direct

The most interesting thing is happening now. Once Ukrainian and Ancient Hebrew often intersected through Greek, Church Slavonic, and Yiddish; today Ukrainian and modern Hebrew increasingly meet directly.

In 2026, a full-fledged Ukrainian-language textbook “Ancient Hebrew Language” by Dmytro Tsolin was published in Ukraine — grammar and syntax of the Tanakh language, exercises, and an Ancient Hebrew-Ukrainian glossary. “Ancient Hebrew Language”: textbook in Ukrainian

In Israel, the project “Nemala נְמָלָה” is already building direct movement in both directions — translating Ukrainian literature into Hebrew and Hebrew into Ukrainian. Project “Nemala נְמָלָה”

As part of this same cultural process, Ukrainian classics appeared in Hebrew, including Skovoroda, and the first volume of “Anthology of Ukrainian Poetry: from Skovoroda to Franko” was published in Israel. Ukrainian classics in Hebrew: Skovoroda Anthology of Ukrainian poetry in Hebrew

That is, the intermediary in the form of Russian is no longer necessary here. Ukrainian text can go directly into Hebrew, and Israeli directly into Ukrainian.

Yiddish is also returning — now through translation

In parallel, another return is happening. In Kyiv in 2025, seven books were presented for the first time translated from Yiddish into Ukrainian; this is no longer the everyday mixing of languages of the old shtetl, but a conscious work with an almost lost cultural layer. Seven books first translated from Yiddish into Ukrainian

The project UkraYiddish went through music: Ukrainian folk songs are translated into Yiddish, Yiddish songs into Ukrainian. Project UkraYiddish

In Kyiv, the collective “Bou Nashir” performs songs in Yiddish and Hebrew, with some participants not coming from Jewish families at all. The language here is not only inherited — it is chosen and studied. Kyiv students sing in Yiddish and Hebrew

And here for readers of NANews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency the story ceases to be a philological exotic: the linguistic contact that happened accidentally for several centuries — because people lived on the same street — today turns into a conscious cultural project.

From Buchach to Israeli literature

There is also a human line to this story.

Buchach — a city in modern Ukraine where Ukrainian, Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew Jewish traditions intersected — gave the world Shmuel Yosef Agnon, a future Nobel laureate and one of the greatest authors of literature in Hebrew. Shmuel Agnon: from Buchach to the Nobel Prize

Today the book “Islands of Memory” connects Buchach with three languages — Ukrainian, English, and Hebrew. “Islands of Memory”: Buchach, Ukraine, and Israel

Haim Hazaz, born in the Kyiv province and raised among Yiddish, Russian, and Ukrainian speech, became one of the most important writers in Hebrew and the first laureate of the Israel Prize for Literature. Haim Hazaz: from Ukrainian Polesia to Israeli literature

And Shaul Tchernichovsky, born in the territory of present-day Zaporizhzhia region, became one of the classics of new Hebrew poetry — today his portrait is known to every Israeli on the 50-shekel banknote. Shaul Tchernichovsky and the Ukrainian trace on 50 shekels

This does not mean that modern literature in Hebrew is “Ukrainian.” It means something else: part of its creators were formed in a multilingual Eastern European environment where Ukrainian speech was one of the components of the everyday sound world.

After 2022, the linguistic balance in Ukraine is changing again

Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism did not disappear instantly, but the proportions have noticeably changed.

According to a survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, conducted from May 7 to June 3, 2026, among 1,000 adult citizens in the territory controlled by Ukraine, 62% reported that they speak predominantly or exclusively Ukrainian at home, 23% use both Ukrainian and Russian, 14% — predominantly or exclusively Russian. The sample did not include residents of territories outside government control and citizens who went abroad after February 24, 2022, so these numbers cannot be applied to all Ukrainians worldwide.

That is, Russian in Ukraine remains a living everyday language for millions of people. At the same time, Ukrainian has significantly expanded the space of domestic and public use.

And it is important not to confuse this with the question of the origin of the two languages. The sociological prevalence of a language and its genealogical status are different things.

What does Ukrainian law say — and what does Yiddish and Hebrew have to do with it

Article 10 of the Constitution of Ukraine establishes Ukrainian as the state language and simultaneously speaks of guarantees for the free development, use, and protection of the languages of national minorities. The 2019 law primarily regulates the public sphere and explicitly states that its action does not extend to private communication and religious rites.

On June 13, 2026, law No. 4699-IX came into force, updating the application of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The list now includes, among others, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Gagauz, Crimean Tatar, Polish, Romanian, Slovak — as well as particularly important for our topic Hebrew and Yiddish; the Russian language is not on this list.

The background of the inclusion of Hebrew and Yiddish was analyzed by NANews even at the draft law stage. “Hebrew and Yiddish will become protected languages in Ukraine”

For linguistics, this does not change the origin of languages, but for cultural history, it is symbolic: two Jewish languages, one of which was the everyday speech of Ukrainian cities and towns for centuries, are today legally recognized as part of the historical linguistic diversity of the country.

So what really lies between Ukrainian and Russian

Not an abyss — and not identity.

Ukrainian and Russian are closely related. They have a huge common Slavic layer, similar grammatical categories, and many words transparent to each other.

But Ukrainian has developed its own path for centuries. Its vocabulary is especially closely connected with Belarusian and Polish; in different regions, it interacted with Romanian, Hungarian, German, Turkic languages. And several centuries of daily coexistence with Jews created another layer — Ukrainian-Yiddish, significantly deeper than usually imagined by the modern reader.

This is where the most interesting part of the whole story becomes clear.

Russian has greatly influenced the linguistic biography of Ukrainians. Polish and Belarusian — on the historical structure of the Ukrainian vocabulary. Yiddish absorbed Ukrainian words, models, and intonations, simultaneously giving Ukrainian part of its urban and Jewish vocabulary. Hebrew influenced primarily through religious writing and Yiddish, preserved early Ukrainian toponymic evidence, and today already directly meets Ukrainian in translations, textbooks, and Israeli literary life.

Therefore, four numbers — 84, 70, 68, and 62 — are interesting not as a competition: who is “closer” to Ukrainian.

They make you see another map.

On this map, Ukrainian is not on the periphery of the Russian language, but within a large historical space between Eastern and Western Slavs, Central Europe, and Jewish Eastern Europe. Here Belarusian and Polish, Russian and Slovak, Ukrainian Yiddish of Berdychiv and Chernivtsi, the ancient Hebrew text of the Kyiv letter, and modern Hebrew of Tel Aviv stand side by side.

And perhaps it is especially easy to understand this from Israel. Here a person can speak with parents in Russian, with children in Hebrew, remember a few Yiddish words from a grandmother, and today read Ukrainian news. These languages do not turn into one because of this.

They simply tell the story of a person.

So does Ukrainian: the fact that millions of Ukrainians know Russian does not make Ukrainian a variety of Russian. And the fact that traces of each other are preserved in Ukrainian and Yiddish, Ukrainian and Hebrew does not erase the boundaries between languages — on the contrary, it shows how long their speakers lived in a shared history.