The Ukrainian Language Is Not a 'Dialect of Russian'

Where this myth comes from

The myth about the Ukrainian language being a “dialect” has deep roots in Russian imperial policy. In 1863, Minister of Internal Affairs Pyotr Valuev issued the notorious circular in which he declared: “There has been no separate Little Russian language, there is none, and there cannot be one.” This circular banned printing educational and religious literature in Ukrainian.

In 1876, the Ems Decree of Alexander II further restricted the use of the Ukrainian language: importing Ukrainian books was banned, original texts in Ukrainian could not be printed (only translations from Russian), Ukrainian theatrical performances were banned, and even Ukrainian song lyrics were prohibited.

Modern Russian propaganda repeats these same narratives, claiming that the Ukrainian language was “invented” by Austrians in the 19th century to weaken Russia, or that it is merely a “corrupted” version of Russian.

What science says

Independent development from Proto-Slavic

Professor Yuriy Shevelov (Columbia and Harvard Universities) in his foundational work “A Historical Phonology of the Ukrainian Language” (1979) traced in detail the independent development of the Ukrainian phonetic system from the Proto-Slavic period. Shevelov showed that the key phonetic features distinguishing Ukrainian from Russian formed as early as the 11th–13th centuries — long before any “Austrian intrigues.”

These features include:

• Ikavism (the shift of ancient ě, о, е to і): khlib (bread) vs Russian khleb; kin (horse) vs Russian kon
• Preservation of h in place of ancient g: holova (head) is pronounced with the fricative [ɦ], not the plosive [g] as in Russian
• Softening of consonants before е: different from the Russian system
• Alternation of u/v: u mene / v mene — unique to Ukrainian

Lexical differences

According to comparative studies, the lexical similarity between Ukrainian and Russian is approximately 62% — less than between Spanish and Portuguese (89%), or between Czech and Slovak (86%).

Ukrainian is lexically closer to:

• Polish — 70% shared vocabulary
• Belarusian — 84% shared vocabulary
• Slovak — 68% shared vocabulary

This means that by the lexical criterion, Ukrainian is closer to three other Slavic languages than to Russian.

Grammatical differences

Ukrainian has a number of grammatical features absent in Russian:

• Vocative case: Ivane! Mariiko! Druže! — the seventh case, absent from modern Russian
• Pluperfect tense: ya buv khodуv (I had gone) — an analytic past tense form
• Infinitive in -ty: khodity, bachyty, znaty (cf. Russian khodit, videt, znat)
• Synthetic future tense: khodytыmu, znatыmu — fusion of the infinitive with the form imu
• Consonant alternations in declension: ruka — rutsi, noha — nozi

Ancient written monuments

The first texts with distinct Ukrainian linguistic features date back to the 12th–13th centuries. The Ruska Pravda and the Tale of Bygone Years contain lexical and phonetic features characteristic of the territory of modern Ukraine.

A fully-formed Ukrainian literary language is documented from the 16th century:

• Peresopnytsia Gospel (1556–1561) — a translation into the contemporary Ukrainian language
• Grammar by Meletiy Smotrytsky (1619) — a description of Church Slavonic with Ukrainian features
• Leksikon slovenoroskyi by Pamva Berynda (1627) — the first printed dictionary with Ukrainian equivalents

Ivan Kotlyarevsky and the new literary language

In 1798, Ivan Kotlyarevsky published “Eneida” — the first major literary work in the modern Ukrainian language. This was 74 years before the Ems Decree and decades before Austria allegedly “invented” the Ukrainian language.

Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861) definitively established Ukrainian as a fully-fledged literary language. His “Kobzar” (1840) became the symbol of Ukrainian linguistic and national identity.

How Russia tried to destroy the Ukrainian language

For centuries the Russian Empire and the USSR systematically persecuted the Ukrainian language:

Year	Document	Restriction
1720	Decree of Peter I	Ban on printing books in Ukrainian
1763	Decree of Catherine II	Ban on teaching in Ukrainian at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
1863	Valuev Circular	”There has been no separate Little Russian language, there is none, and there cannot be one”
1876	Ems Decree	Total ban on Ukrainian printing, theatre, education
1933	Resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of the UkrSSR	Russification of schools, beginning of the destruction of Ukrainisation
1958	Education Reform	Ukrainian effectively made optional in schools of the UkrSSR
1978	Tashkent Conference	Strengthening of Russian as the “language of inter-ethnic communication”

If Ukrainian is merely a “dialect,” why did empires need dozens of decrees and bans to suppress it? The very fact of systematic persecution proves that the authorities considered Ukrainian a real threat to their narrative of “a single people.”

Current status

After gaining independence in 1991, the Ukrainian language has been gradually recovering its position. The shift was particularly powerful after 2022:

• According to sociological surveys, the share of Ukrainian-speaking citizens grew from 44% (2017) to over 60% (2023)
• Many Russian-speaking Ukrainians consciously switched to Ukrainian
• The Language Law (2019) established Ukrainian as the sole state language with guarantees for minority languages

The Ukrainian language is neither a dialect nor an artificial construct. It is a living language with a thousand-year history that survived centuries of bans and continues to develop.