Indo-European · ISO 639-3 ukr · uk
Ukrainian Language українська
Ukrainian is an Indo-European language spoken by about 29 million people in 7 countries. It is an official language of Ukraine. It is written in the Cyrillic and Latin scripts.
Where Ukrainian is spoken
- Official language
- Regional official
- Spoken by 10%+
- 1–10%
- Smaller communities
Countries that speak Ukrainian
Language family
- Indo-European
- Classical Indo-European
- Balto-Slavic
- Slavic
- East Slavic
- Ukrainian-Rusyn
- Ukrainian
Writing system
Cyrillic and Latin scripts
Related languages
About the Ukrainian language
Ukrainian (українська) is spoken by about 29 million people, which makes it the 54th most spoken language in the world — just behind Moroccan Arabic (31 million) and ahead of Igbo (28 million). It belongs to the Indo-European language family and, more precisely, to the Ukrainian-Rusyn group within the Balto-Slavic branch.
Where is Ukrainian spoken?
Ukrainian is used in 7 countries. The largest communities live in Ukraine (23 million), Russia (647,776), Moldova (503,934), Poland (151,110) and Canada (139,661). More than half of the population speaks it in Ukraine — the places where travellers will hear it everywhere.
Share of the population that speaks Ukrainian: Ukraine 65% (23 million), Russia 0.5% (647,776), Moldova 14% (503,934), Poland 0.4% (151,110), Canada 0.4% (139,661) and Slovakia 1.9% (105,709).
Ukrainian is an official language in 1 country: Ukraine. It also has regional official status in Serbia.
Writing system and status
Ukrainian is written in the Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Glottolog classifies it as threatened, meaning fewer children learn it than in the past.
Its closest relatives in the same branch of the family are Russian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Slovak and 2 more.
ISO codes: ISO 639-1 uk, ISO 639-3 ukr.
Frequently asked questions about Ukrainian
How many people speak Ukrainian?
Where is Ukrainian spoken?
In which countries is Ukrainian an official language?
What language family does Ukrainian belong to?
What is Ukrainian called in Ukrainian?
Is Ukrainian an endangered language?
Data: Languages of the World dataset (MIT) — ISO 639-3, Glottolog (CC BY 4.0), Unicode CLDR, Google LinguaMeta (CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata; country lists: samayo/country-json (MIT). Speaker numbers include first- and second-language speakers where sources report them.