Languages in the news
Due to the current Ukrainian crisis, we decided to put a spotlight on the languages of Ukraine.
Lexically Closest Languages
Lexically the closest to Ukrainian is Belorussian (84% of common vocabulary), followed by Polish (70%), Serbo-Croatian (68%), Slovak (66%) and Russian (62%). Some Russians maintain that Ukrainian is merely a dialect of Russian, as it retains a degree of mutual intelligibility.*
Rise & Fall of Russian Language
Close to 300 million people spoke Russian in 1994, just after the fall of the Soviet Union. That number has decreased by about 120 million, according to Russia’s Benjamin Kaganov, deputy minister of education and science.*
Reference: *https://multilingual.com/articles/world-savvy-language-and-turmoil-in-ukraine/
