According to Ukrainian legislation, the Ukrainian language is the only official language of our country. In practice, however, Ukraine is typical bilingual country with a roughly 50/50 split between the Ukrainian language and the Russian language.

As stated by last official Ukrainian population census (2001), 67.5 percent of Ukrainian citizens consider Ukrainian to be their mother tongue versus 29.6 percent of Ukrainian citizens who consider Russian to be their mother tongue.

Ukrainian tends to be spoken at government institutions, official state events, universities and in artistic bohemian circles, among intellectuals.

Russian is often a more practical language in technical schools, commerce, entertainment and show business, urban youth subcultures, Hi-Tech and IT-technologies. Even in these environments, however, there is NO strict rule.

The absolute majority of the population understands both languages, so it’s not uncommon to see a conversation on the street where one participant uses Ukrainian, the other Russian (and vise versa). A good example (if you have some knowledge of either language) is to watch a talk shows on Ukrainian TV. It quickly becomes evident that Ukrainian and Russian are regularly used in the same conversation.

Often you will even hear elements of both languages coming from the same speaker! While grammar teachers may consider this improper (to combine the two languages together), many people speak such kind of language. This form of the Ukrainian-Russian language is known as “surzhyk” (chaotic mix).

Of course, the usage of Ukrainian and Russian is quite divergent depending on the region of Ukraine. On one extreme, a very small percentage (less than 5%) of the population uses Ukrainian in Crimea and the cities in the Eastern part of the country – Mariupol, Donetsk and Lugansk. These cities are predominantly Russian speaking. Even the current President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych (originally from Donetsk) speaks very poor Ukrainian.

On the other extreme, a very high percentage (greater than 95%) of the population uses Ukrainian in Western part of the country – in the cities like Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk.

Other cities fall somewhere closer to the mean, depending in large part to their proximity East or West of the Dnieper River.

 

Its important to remember that these figures are just estimates since, when asked, many individual Ukrainians can’t even say definitively which language they use on every-day basis because they are using both languages intuitively.