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Probably not so much the other way, most Ukrainians are fluent in Russian, I doubt many Russians are fluent in Ukranian
I wonder how many Ukrainians can only speak Russian. Languages can be hard for some people.
I thought I heard that zelensky himself only knew Russian until relatively recently
They are incredibly similar languages that are more mutually intelligible, similar to Swedish/Norwegian/Danish or Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian.
I heard it's more like Spanish/Portuguese which share some similarities but not mutually intelligible
Mostly all. It's because USSR only used russian as country's language so every nation in the country was forced to learn this language and there were many nations in ussr.
Not true, there were plenty of native Ukrainian speakers and those knowing it well, also with, eh, changing prestige of the language more people learn it, it's very close after all, like Scots to English.
Can anyone explain how different the languages are? Super different or "they kind of get eachother, just are noticably different"
They have similar alphabets, grammar and a lot of cognates. If you only spoke one you'd be able to recognize most of a sentence with these things, but sometimes words are totally different. They probably sound similar to someone unfamiliar with both, but they are quite distinct.
So like Spanish and Italian or closer?
It appears, lexically they are closer than Spanish and Italian, close to like Italian and Romanian, but a bit further. There are many ways to measure language distance though, so this is just a vague analogy
I thought they were mutually intelligible?
Actually they are not. It's just that knowing a bit of the other language is too common to understand that for many people. Also very often for person asked some kind of surzhik (a mix) is imagined instead of one of these languages.
That's a bit like how English speakers often imagine Scots - just English with weird accent. It's obviously not that.
Russian has too much Church Slavic influence, Ukrainian has a bit more Polish, German etc influence, and also the Church Slavic influence there is a bit different (say, the loanwords were adapted for East Slavic phonetics mostly).
In Russian the prestigious language was Church Slavic, in Ukrainian - a written East Slavic language, so Ukrainian is a bit more consistent.
If we hypothetically remove that, I'm not sure they'd be considered different languages (despite there being dialectal differences even in XII century).
Similar enough for mutual intelligibility but different enough that Russian only speakers will probably run into a shiboleth
Like Spanish from Mexico and Spanish from Spain?
No need for people to even speak different languages to run into shibboleth, the pronunciation of Russian is very different in different regions, the Ukrainian is not homogeneous either.
Somebody once said to me that it's rather like the difference between English and Dutch.
If you ever hear Dutch it rather sounds like English and you've just not quite heard them correctly. If you were in another room and just heard the ebb and flow of the language you'd probably not be able to tell the difference, but in person directly you can.
And as a non-speaker of both languages they sound basically the same to me so I think it is true
There is a lexical tree that gives some insight. Lexicostatistical distance would have worked better, I think, but I cant seem to find the numbers for that kind of metric.
Here I've edited an excerpt from the table, that shows how far Russian and Ukrainian are and how that compares to some other European languages
I don't have data, but feels wrong. Maybe if this is about historical, genetic distance, then yes, Belarusian is quite a lot closer to Russian.
But in reality Ukrainian and Belarusian have mostly the same West Russian lexicon, while Russian is different (say, more South Slavic, as in Church Slavic, loanwords), for historical reasons (in GDL West Russian written language was used for administration in its East Slavic parts ; in Muscovy Church Slavic was prestigious, so the official language was heavily influenced by that).
You can as well download the PDF and read the description, the thing is not based on historical reasons, it analyses a selected part of each language core using algorithm that is used to analyse DNA distance, as far as I understand.
To address what you've said, it sais:
So the Ukrainian and Belarussian are likely different enough in everything else than the lexicon you've mentioned
They are similar in lexicon and grammar, but phonetically very different, almost as if they were in the opposite directions from Russian.
I'd say, Ukrainian have more brutal (deep throat) sounding than russian, but maybe it's only local thing with Ukrainian guys i was talking with. So, usually it's like 14 years old kid in Ukraine sounds like grown up Russian dude
That may be about pronunciation of a few sounds, anybody from the southwest of Russia sounds the same.
Also intonation in Ukrainian can on the contrary feel more gentle\polite.
No, your imagination betrays you on this subject.
Most Ukrainians are fluent in Russian, but with southern accent, and plenty of them also bad at Ukrainian at the same time.
A lot of Russians speak it with the same southern accent and know some Ukrainian.
There's no clear border in that sense. Also there are still plenty of people born in Ukraine living in Russia and vice versa, maybe millions.
For half of Ukraine and half the (Slavic) south of Russia the whole idea of choosing between being Ukrainian and Russian was preposterous not so long ago.
Very interesting to hear this.
So are you saying that (aside from this war) people from Donetsk and Rostov used to be more similar to each other culturallly and linguistically than compared to either Moscow or Kyiv?
In Donetsk and Rostov specifically - yes, but it's still been a one-sided gradual change from people speaking Ukrainian or dialects closer to it to Russian with southern accent, as I said. Mostly during Soviet years, as Don, Kuban, even Terek Cossacks and their dialects would sometimes be described as Ukrainian. So yes, but not quite.
While, say, in Polesye, Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian dialects literally form a continuum, which fits your question more as an example.
I think it could be worst for russia even thinking about fluency: as I understand, russia reallocated thousands of Ukrainians in its far siberian territories as part of the ethnic cleansing of crimea and surroundings
Edit: this was done in the 30s
According to Wikipedia, there are 1.928 million ethnic Ukrainians currently living in Russia.
Wasn't relocation a huge part of the Soviet system? As they took territory they would move people around so that there were more Russians in the territories, presumably less chance at ethnic uprisings?
Yes, but that was not the only reason.
The Soviets would send foreign intelligentsia and bourgeois (including slightly better off farmers) to die in Siberia in order to reduce the chances of uprising.
They would also mix populations in order to reduce national loyalties and would also encourage mixed ethnicity families to eventually absorb smaller nations into the Russian identity.
It's not just Soviet system, Russian colonization of Siberia, North Caucasus etc was in large part done by Ukrainians. These people don't usually identify as such, though, it's a purely historical note.
And that's false and seems to be taken from some strategy game.
I mean, the USSR did have dubious ethnic policies, somewhere aiming for ethnically homogeneous population, and somewhere as intermixed as possible. Like ethnically cleansing Ukrainians from Poland and settling them in Ukraine, and ethnically cleansing Poles from Ukraine and settling them in Poland.
The "moving around" thing wasn't connected to this, it was a direct consequence of the "distribution" system where a graduate was legally required to work a few years in a place they were sent to (which could be on the other end of the union), and also people would move all over the union to study in better universities etc.
Most people wouldn't return to their birthplace, even if they wouldn't remain at the place they were sent to after graduation.
Which, well, makes sense for young people.
You do realize that Russians in Siberia are most often descendants of Ukrainian colonists, I hope? Same near Kazakhstan (and in it), same in the North Caucasus.
Yes that's exactly what I meant, the similarity of the languages, but I didn't know whether that is equal both ways. I sincerely hope you are right, that it's more difficult for the Russians.
I noticed this in the beginning of the war, that it would be relatively easy for Ukraine to perform sabotage in Russia. I'm kind of surprised it's not more wide spread?
It's quite easy to understand each other for both parties, but Ukrainians actually learn the Russian language in school, so they can speak good Russian. Russians can't speak good Ukrainian as they don't learn it. And speaking is very important for sabotage operations.