That word is a good place to start for this edition. Ukrainian, as a language, carries that quality throughout. It has a special kind of richness that is difficult to explain, with tender, gravitating depth borne from a nurturing and protective culture.
Ukraine is the largest country that lies entirely within Europe. Its countryside is also incredibly beautiful. Its national flag of blue above and gold below represents two of the most typical things you will see as you travel across its countryside: endless sunflower fields and golden wheat-covered rolling hills hitting the horizon, with big blue sky overhead.
In the west, the Carpathian Mountains rise through dense evergreen forest toward alpine meadows with Ukraine’s highest peak, Mount Hoverla, looming at 2,061 metres. Below it, the Prut River begins its life, threading through thick forests. In the winter, the waterfalls freeze solid, forming towers of white-blue ice hanging in mid-air stillness.
The Dnipro, Europe’s fourth longest river, cuts the country in half as it runs south toward the Black Sea. Along its banks, the soil is among the richest on earth. The black earth of the Ukrainian steppe — the chornozem — accounts for roughly a quarter of the world’s most fertile agricultural land. For centuries, Ukraine has been called the breadbasket of Europe, and one of the reasons it has been fought over for just as long.
This landscape along with its language, storytelling, and social traditions, constitutes the Ukrainian identity.
A Brief History
The city of Kyiv was founded on the Dnipro’s western bank in the 5th century and grew into the capital of Kievan Rus. It was a medieval federation of East Slavic peoples, influenced in part by Norse traders and warriors who travelled the region’s river networks and played a significant role in the formation of the early state. At its height in the 10th and 11th centuries, Kievan Rus was one of the most powerful states in Europe. It was here that Eastern Orthodox Christianity took root and formed the spiritual and cultural life of the land for the next thousand years. Old Ukrainian, the language of that era, served as the literary and administrative medium of this civilization.
The Mongol invasion of 1240 destroyed that world. What followed were centuries of rotating sovereignties — Lithuanian, Polish, Ottoman, and eventually Russian — each administering the territory according to their own political needs, and each leaving their mark on the language, the culture, the architecture, and the people. Ukrainian absorbed Polish and German loanwords in the west, Tatar and Turkish influences from the southern steppes, and Church Slavonic from the Orthodox liturgical tradition.
Then, the Cossack Hetmanate of the 17th century produced its own legal codes, its own literary culture, and a distinct political identity. The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, founded in 1632, became a centre of Ukrainian language and scholarship whose influence spread across the Orthodox world. An educated Ukrainian of that period switched fluently between Ukrainian, Latin, and Church Slavonic. The language of that era was refined, complex, and used in both oratory and philosophical writing.
By the 19th century, Ukraine was divided administratively: the western regions under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the east and centre under the Russian Empire. Ukrainian was periodically banned from publication, removed from education, and officially categorized at various points as a dialect rather than a language.
Despite that, Ukrainian writers and poets published anyway. The language continued to be spoken in homes, sung in churches, and passed from generation to generation.
After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires at the end of World War I, Ukraine became an independent state, just to be reclaimed by the Soviet Union after World War II.
The Soviet century that followed was ruthlessly determined and methodical. Collectivization restructured the agricultural way of life that had defined Ukrainian villages for many generations: the small-holder farms, the seasonal rhythms, the local knowledge shared in dialect and custom. The Holodomor of 1932–33, a famine resulting from Soviet grain requisition policies under Stalin, killed millions of Ukrainians and struck hardest in the rural heartland.
Russification was implemented as a policy. Ukrainian was removed from schools, from official life, from the public sphere, replaced by Russian as the language of education, advancement, and legitimacy. Then, generations grew up navigating a bilingual reality where one language carried institutional weight while the other was expected to die out.
And then there were the kobzari. They were typically blind men who played the kobza, a lute-like stringed instrument, who had wandered Ukraine over the centuries, singing epic songs chronicling historical events, Cossack heroism, preserving the moral life of the community, history and identity in oral form from village to village. The kobzari held a unique social position. They were respected, sometimes revered, and believed to carry something important. Their blindness was perceived as a kind of insightful ability to see and speak the truth that others could not. In 1932, they were gathered by Stalin’s party at a congress in Kharkiv under the pretense of celebrating cultural heritage. When they arrived, they were taken outside the city and shot. An entire living tradition from its repertoire, its techniques, and its practitioners, extinguished.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine re-emerged as an independent nation in 1991. With it came its cultural memory – its language, the songs, customs like their elaborately hand-painted Easter eggs, traditional embroidered patterns, or the epic poems that had somehow survived – and the hard determination of its people to never again be erased as a nation.
The Sound of Ukrainian
Ukrainian is often described as softly melodic. The comparison made most often is to Italian. Both languages share a vowel richness that gives them their characteristic flow: consonants cushioned and opened by vowels on both ends, so that even ordinary speech has an up and down kind of cadence to it.
This phonological cadence is its main aesthetic feature. The language has multiple forms of the same small words; three variants of the conjunction and, alternative forms of common prepositions that preserve a balance between consonants and vowels in the run of a sentence.
Native speakers describe it as something close to a nightingale song. The sopilka, a traditional Ukrainian wooden flute which can mimic birdsong has the same quality with which native speakers associate their language: the hard and the soft alternating in patterns that create a smooth, continuous flow.
To foreign ears, Ukrainian sounds like Russian. That’s understandable, given Ukraine’s long co-existence with Russia and being a fluently bilingual state. However, there are significant phonological differences. There is the ґ — the Ukrainian h sound, a voiced fricative that distinguishes Ukrainian from Russian more clearly than almost any other phoneme. It is softer than the Russian ґ, breathier, and the first giveaway that you’re hearing Ukrainian.
Compared to Ukrainian open vowels, Russian unstressed vowels are clipped, giving it comparatively flatter, more compressed sound that creates a different cadence.
Similarity to Russian
Ukrainian and Russian are often assumed by non-Slavic speakers to be near-identical. Both are East Slavic languages, both use Cyrillic, and they share enough core vocabulary that speakers can sometimes follow each other’s meaning. But mutual intelligibility for spoken language hovers somewhere around 50–60% at best.
The sound alone gives it away immediately, but beyond sound, the vocabulary for emotional and psychological experience, the register in which tradition and daily life is shared, diverges substantially. Ukrainian drew from Polish, Czech, and Central European influences, while Russian did not. They are two distinct languages that are related like cousins. Recognizably they are from the same family, but definitely not identical nor interchangeable.
Cyrillic Writing System
Ukrainian is officially written in Cyrillic, though slightly different than the Russian version. The Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters. Four of them ( і, ї, є, and ґ) do not exist in Russian, while three letters that Russian uses do not exist in Ukrainian.
Cyrillic was developed in the 9th century by the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius, initially as a tool for rendering Old Church Slavonic liturgical script in written form. Over time, Ukrainians adopted it, and adapted it to their own phonology.
The modern Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet was largely standardized in the 19th century, when the language was under its most sustained administrative pressure. Ukrainians codified the writing system while it was being suppressed in an effort to preserve it, because it is more difficult to stop a language from being spoken and learned when it can be written down and recorded in a consistent way.
Under Austro-Hungarian administration, Ukrainian was written in a Latin-based alphabet (the latynka). However, it never displaced Cyrillic due to the influence of the Orthodox Church, and because Ukraine’s vast literary tradition is already written in Cyrillic, and most Ukrainian speakers across all regions were already Cyrillic-literate.
In informal digital communication, especially among younger Ukrainians, it’s common to see texts and online posts in casual romanization that phonetically renders Ukrainian words in Latin characters. This is only a practical adaptation of people typing on keyboards that default to Latin script, called transliteration. The official script is Cyrillic.
The Significance of the Trident Symbol
The trident — the tryzub in Ukrainian — is one of the oldest symbols in the country. Today, it’s globally associated with the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces, but in Ukrainian culture, it goes way back to the times of the Kievan Rus.
It appears on coins and seals of the Kievan Rus princes as far back as the 10th century, most prominently associated with Volodymyr the Great, the ruler who Christianized Kievan Rus in the 10th century. What the trident represented to those early rulers is unknown. Theories range from a stylized bird in flight, to a diving falcon, to an anchor, to a dynastic mark. So far, the consensus is that it was a symbol of authority at the founding moment of Ukrainian ancestry.
It was adopted as Ukraine’s state emblem when independence was first declared in 1917, chosen specifically because of that ancient lineage. The Soviet period erased it from official life, but it returned with independence in 1991 and is now the official state emblem of Ukraine, appearing on the flag, on military insignia, and on currency.
In everyday life, it is also the subject of various jokes among Ukrainians. Ukraine having a deeply agricultural identity apparently chose a pitchfork as its national emblem. Hardly an intimidating symbol. During the early days of independence in the 1990s, some Ukrainians, especially those who had grown up in the Soviet system, irreverently joked that it looked like a pitchfork (a “vyla”) that was missing a prong which Ukraine lost somewhre along the way and hadn’t gotten around to finding it yet.
In Ukrainian popular culture, it is used in many different memes, some in humorous contexts. In the early days of the Russian invasion, a joke circulated that Russia, with its eagle emblem that resembles more a chicken, would be foolish enough to attack a country with a pitchfork as its national symbol.
For Ukrainians, the trident carries national pride, unity of its people, and the full weight of Ukrainian history, from oppression to freedom.
Ukrainians' Poetic Prophet
No conversation about the Ukrainian language is complete without Taras Shevchenko. Born into serfdom in 1814 on an estate just over a hundred kilometres from Kyiv, Shevchenko spent his childhood being a servant to cruel Russian noblemen.
Following a move with his master to St. Petersburg, his talent as a painter eventually caught the attention of prominent artists in the then Russian capital, who raised funds through a lottery of artwork to buy his freedom. He then enrolled at the Imperial Academy of Arts. Later, in the white nights of the city in 1837, he began to write.
His first poetry collection, Kobzar, was published in 1840 and named after the kobzari, the blind roaming bards. They sang about history, grief, and defiance. Shevchenko’s Kobzar was written in a lyrical vernacular that ordinary Ukrainians identified as their own; it blended the rhythms of folk song with the moral weight of selfhood, Cossack independence, and the experience of being a servant without choice.
Shevchenko gave Ukrainian a true literary and cultural voice. He demonstrated how deeply the language could convey grief, beauty, rage, love and that it is a powerful vessel sufficient for everything its people needed to say.
The Tsarist regime read the stakes well enough to arrest him in 1847. For a decade, he was exiled to Central Asia with a specific prohibition on writing and painting. He wrote anyway. In secret, in a series of small notebooks which he hid.
One of Shevchenko’s recurring anxieties was that Ukrainians would assimilate. That under enough pressure, enough generations would grow up in someone else’s language, someone else’s history, and lose the thread back to themselves. He wrote directly to future Ukrainians, urging them to remember.
The fact that Ukraine is now being actively reclaimed, in cities where Russian was most dominant, resonates with many Ukrainians. Shevchenko’s warning is finally being heeded. The lines from his poetry most quoted on walls, in messages and speeches, since 2022, translate roughly as:
“Fight and you will prevail. God will help you.” – Taras Shevchenko (1840s)
His grave is on a hill overlooking the Dnipro near Kaniv, called Taras Hill, or Tarasova hora. In the summer, pilgrims hiked to it for over 150 years. Ukrainians today see him as a prophet. Not only because he wrote about what it’s like to be controlled by an outside force but because freedom is once again contested, and both his grief and vindication of everything he said, are still unsettled and hanging in the air.
Folk and Tradition
Ukrainian tradition is a mix of culinary, musical and visual generational customs.
Vyshyvanka is the embroidered shirt that is one of Ukraine’s most recognizable cultural objects. The patterns vary by region: red and black thread dominates in central Ukraine, blue and white in the north. Each motif carries meaning: protection, fertility, the history of a family, a village, a landscape.
The same is true of pysanky, the elaborately decorated Easter eggs using a wax-resist method, where pattern and colour are used for symbolism. Red for goodness and the joy of living. Yellow for warmth and harvest. Green for hope. The making of pysanky is a centuries-long family tradition passed from one generation to the next, and the eggs are gifted to people you love.
News coverage showed soldiers returning home for short holiday stays tearfully requesting their favourite meals and sweets from mothers, grandmothers, and wives: paska (Easter bread), varyenky (stuffed dumplings filled with potato, chees or sour cherry), holubtsi (cabbage rolls filled with rice and meat), medivnyk (a dark honey cake spiced with cinnamon and cloves), syrnyky (small fried cottage cheese breakfast pancakes eaten with sour cream), Grandma’s homemade jams, or specific brands of chocolate.
Ukrainian celebration is incomplete without a dance. The hopak is Ukraine’s most iconic folk dance with deep roots in Cossak culture. It is athletic, percussive, and high energy that needs a spacious floor and a clapping audience. Men drop into deep squats and kick out with force, leap, and spin. Women move in counterpoint, flowing, grounded, arms making wide arcs and their embroidered skirts fanning out with each turn. The costumes are elaborate and colourful. Women wear the vyshyvanka blouse under an embroidered vest, a floral wreath (vinok) set into their hair, ribbons streaming down their backs in the colours of the region. Men wear loose embroidered shirts belted at the waist, wide trousers called sharovary, and soft leather boots. The hopak was banned under Soviet cultural policy at various points for being too Ukrainian, but they danced it anyway.
Like its speakers, Ukrainian has been suppressed, dismissed, periodically banned, and yet it is still here. The pitchfork is mighty, defiant and ready for the chicken.
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About the Author
Monika Vance | Managing Director | SANTIUM
My work sits at the intersection of linguistics, scientific and medical translation, psychometric measurement, and multilingual operations, where terminology, usability, end-user experience, and regulatory context must align. I write about scientific and medical translations, psychometrics, languages, patient-centred research and the operational challenges that inevitably come with them. I also teach translators how to properly translate and validate complex psychometric instruments to hone their expertise in linguistic validation.
Monika Vance
Managing Director | SANTIUM
My work sits at the intersection of linguistics, scientific and medical translation, psychometric measurement, and multilingual operations, where terminology, usability, and regulatory context must align. I write about scientific and medical translations, psychometrics, languages, patient-centred research and the operational challenges that inevitably come with them. I also teach translators how to properly translate and validate complex psychometric instruments to hone their expertise in linguistic validation.
