title: Portuguese language

text: The predominance of Southeastern-based media products has established as the pronoun of choice for the second person singular in both writing and multimedia communications. However, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the country's main cultural center, the usage of has been expanding ever since the end of the 20th century, being most frequent among youngsters, and a number of studies have also shown an increase in its use in a number of other Brazilian dialects.


title: Portuguese language

text: Modern Standard European Portuguese ( or ) is based on the Portuguese spoken in the area including and surrounding the cities of Coimbra and Lisbon, in central Portugal. Standard European Portuguese is also the preferred standard by the Portuguese-speaking African countries. As such, and despite the fact that its speakers are dispersed around the world, Portuguese has only two dialects used for learning: the European and the Brazilian. Some aspects and sounds found in many dialects of Brazil are exclusive to South America, and cannot be found in Europe. The same occur with the Santomean, Mozambican, Bissau-Guinean, Angolan and Cape Verdean dialects, being exclusive to Africa. See Portuguese in Africa.


title: Portuguese language

text: Audio samples of some dialects and accents of Portuguese are available below. There are some differences between the areas but these are the best approximations possible. IPA transcriptions refer to the names in local pronunciation.


title: Portuguese language

text: Differences between dialects are mostly of accent and vocabulary, but between the Brazilian dialects and other dialects, especially in their most colloquial forms, there can also be some grammatical differences. The Portuguese-based creoles spoken in various parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas are independent languages.


title: Portuguese language

text: Portuguese, like Catalan, preserves the stressed vowels of Vulgar Latin which became diphthongs in most other Romance languages; cf. Port., Cat., Sard. "pedra" ; Fr. ', Sp. ', It. ', Ro. ', from Lat. ' ("stone"); or Port. ', Cat. ', Sard. '; Sp. ', It. ', Fr. ', Ro. ', from Lat. ' ("fire"). Another characteristic of early Portuguese was the loss of intervocalic "l" and "n", sometimes followed by the merger of the two surrounding vowels, or by the insertion of an epenthetic vowel between them: cf. Lat. ' ("to exit"), ' ("to have"), ' ("jail"), Port. ', ', "".


title: Portuguese language

text: When the elided consonant was "n", it often nasalized the preceding vowel: cf. Lat. ' ("hand"), ' ("frog"), ' ("good"), Old Portuguese ', ', ' (Portuguese: ', ', '). This process was the source of most of the language's distinctive nasal diphthongs. In particular, the Latin endings "-anem", ' and ' became ' in most cases, cf. Lat. ' ("dog"), ' ("brother"), ' ("reason") with Modern Port. ', ', ', and their plurals "-anes", "-anos", "-ones" normally became "-ães", "-ãos", "-ões", cf. "cães", "irmãos", "razões".


title: Portuguese language

text: The Portuguese language is the only Romance language that preserves the clitic case mesoclisis: cf. (I'll give thee), (I'll love you), (I'll contact them). Like Galician, it also retains the Latin synthetic pluperfect tense: (I had been), (I had lived), (you had lived). Romanian also has this tense, but uses the -s- form.


title: Portuguese language

text: Most of the lexicon of Portuguese is derived, directly or through other Romance languages, from Latin. Nevertheless, because of its original Lusitanian and Celtic Gallaecian heritage, and the later participation of Portugal in the Age of Discovery, it has a relevant number of words from the ancient Hispano-Celtic group and adopted loanwords from other languages around the world.


title: Portuguese language

text: A number of Portuguese words can still be traced to the pre-Roman inhabitants of Portugal, which included the Gallaeci, Lusitanians, Celtici and Cynetes. Most of these words derived from the Hispano-Celtic Gallaecian language of northwestern Iberia, and are very often shared with Galician since both languages have the same origin in the medieval language of Galician-Portuguese. A few of these words existed in Latin as loanwords from other Celtic sources, often Gaulish. Altogether these are over 2,000 words, some verbs and toponymic names of towns, rivers, utensils and plants.


title: Portuguese language

text: In the 5th century, the Iberian Peninsula (the Roman Hispania) was conquered by the Germanic, Suebi and Visigoths. As they adopted the Roman civilization and language, however, these people contributed with some 500


title: Portuguese language

text: Germanic words to the lexicon. Many of these words are related to warfare, such as 'spur', ('stake'), and ('war'), from Gothic "*spaúra", "*stakka", and "*wirro" respectively; the natural world i.e. ('swine') from "*sweina", ('hawk') from "*gabilans", ('wave') from "*vigan", human emotions such as or ('pride', 'proud') from Old Germanic "*urguol" or verbs like ('to craft, record, graft') from "*graba" or ('to squeeze, quash, grind') from Suebian "*magōn" or ('to shred') from "*harpō". The Germanic languages influence also exists in toponymic surnames and patronymic surnames borne by Visigoth sovereigns and their descendants, and it dwells on placenames such as Ermesinde, Esposende and Resende where "sinde" and "sende" are derived from the Germanic "sinths" ('military expedition') and in the case of Resende, the prefix "re" comes from Germanic "reths" ('council'). Other examples of Portuguese names, surnames and town names of Germanic toponymic origin include Henrique, Henriques, Vermoim, Mandim, Calquim, Baguim, Gemunde, Guetim, Sermonde and many more, are quite common mainly in the old Suebi and later Visigothic dominated regions, covering today's Northern half of Portugal and Galicia.


title: Portuguese language

text: Between the 9th and early 13th centuries, Portuguese acquired some 400 to 600 words from Arabic by influence of Moorish Iberia. They are often recognizable by the initial Arabic article "a(l)-", and include common words such as ('village') from الضيعة "alḍaiʿa", ('lettuce') from الخس "alkhass", ('warehouse') from المخزن "almakhzan", and ('olive oil') from الزيت "azzait".


title: Portuguese language

text: Starting in the 15th century, the Portuguese maritime explorations led to the introduction of many loanwords from Asian languages. For instance, ('cutlass') from Japanese "katana", ('tea') from Chinese "chá", and "canja" ('chicken-soup, piece of cake') from Malay.


title: Portuguese language

text: From the 16th to the 19th centuries, because of the role of Portugal as intermediary in the Atlantic slave trade, and the establishment of large Portuguese colonies in Angola, Mozambique, and Brazil, Portuguese acquired several words of African and Amerind origin, especially names for most of the animals and plants found in those territories. While those terms are mostly used in the former colonies, many became current in European Portuguese as well. From Kimbundu, for example, came "kifumate" > ('head caress') (Brazil), "kusula" > ('youngest child') (Brazil), ('tropical wasp') (Brazil), and "kubungula" > ('to dance like a wizard') (Angola). From South America came ('potato'), from Taino; and , from Tupi–Guarani "naná" and Tupi "ibá cati", respectively (two species of pineapple), and ('popcorn') from Tupi and ('toucan') from Guarani "tucan".


title: Portuguese language

text: Finally, it has received a steady influx of loanwords from other European languages, especially French and English. These are by far the most important languages when referring to loanwords. There are many examples such as: / ('bracket'/'crochet'), ('jacket'), ('lipstick'), and / ('steak'/'slice'), ('street'), respectively, from French , , , , ; and ('steak'), , , /, , from English "beef," "football," "revolver," "stock," "folklore."


title: Portuguese language

text: Examples from other European languages: ('pasta'), ('pilot'), ('carriage'), and ('barrack'), from Italian , , , and ; ('hair lock'), ('wet-cured ham') (in Portugal, in contrast with "presunto" 'dry-cured ham' from Latin "prae-exsuctus" 'dehydrated') or ('canned ham') (in Brazil, in contrast with non-canned, wet-cured ("presunto cozido") and dry-cured ("presunto cru")), or "castelhano" ('Castilian'), from Spanish "melena" ('mane'), "fiambre" and "castellano."


title: Portuguese language

text: Portuguese belongs to the West Iberian branch of the Romance languages, and it has special ties with the following members of this group:


title: Portuguese language

text: Portuguese and other Romance languages (namely French and Italian) share considerable similarities in both vocabulary and grammar. Portuguese speakers will usually need some formal study before attaining strong comprehension in those Romance languages, and vice versa. However, Portuguese and Galician are fully mutually intelligible, and Spanish is considerably intelligible for lusophones, owing to their genealogical proximity and shared genealogical history as West Iberian (Ibero-Romance languages), historical contact between speakers and mutual influence, shared areal features as well as modern lexical, structural, and grammatical similarity (89%) between them.


title: Portuguese language

text: Portuñol/Portunhol, a form of code-switching, has a more lively use and is more readily mentioned in popular culture in South America. Said code-switching is not to be confused with the Portuñol spoken on the borders of Brazil with Uruguay () and Paraguay (), and of Portugal with Spain (), that are Portuguese dialects spoken natively by thousands of people, which have been heavily influenced by Spanish.


title: Portuguese language

text: Portuguese and Spanish are the only Ibero-Romance languages, and perhaps the only Romance languages with such thriving inter-language forms, in which visible and lively bilingual contact dialects and code-switching have formed, in which functional bilingual communication is achieved through attempting an approximation to the target foreign language (known as 'Portuñol') without a learned acquisition process, but nevertheless facilitates communication. There is an emerging literature focused on such phenomena (including informal attempts of standardization of the linguistic continua and their usage).


title: Portuguese language

text: The closest relative of Portuguese is Galician, which is spoken in the autonomous community (region) and historical nationality of Galicia (northwestern Spain). The two were at one time a single language, known today as Galician-Portuguese, but they have diverged especially in pronunciation and vocabulary due to the political separation of Portugal from Galicia. There is, however, still a linguistic continuity consisting of the variant of Galician referred to as "galego-português baixo-limiao", which is spoken in several Galician and Portuguese villages within the transboundary biosphere reserve of Gerês-Xurés. It is "considered a rarity, a living vestige of the medieval language that ranged from Cantabria to Mondego [...]".


title: Portuguese language

text: As reported by UNESCO, due to the pressure of Spanish on the standard official version of Galician and centuries-old Hispanization, the Galician language was on the verge of disappearing. According to the UNESCO philologist Tapani Salminen, the proximity to Portuguese protects Galician.


title: Portuguese language

text: The core vocabulary and grammar of Galician are noticeably closer to Portuguese than to those of Spanish and within the EU context, Galician is often considered the same language as Portuguese. Galician like Portuguese, uses the future subjunctive, the personal infinitive, and the synthetic pluperfect. Mutual intelligibility (estimated at 90% by R. A. Hall, Jr., 1989) is excellent between Galicians and northern Portuguese. Despite political efforts in Spain to define them as separate languages, many linguists consider Galician to be a co-dialect of the Portuguese language with regional variations.


title: Portuguese language

text: Another member of the Galician-Portuguese group, most commonly thought of as a Galician dialect, is spoken in the Eonavian region in a western strip in Asturias and the westernmost parts of the provinces of León and Zamora, along the frontier with Galicia, between the Eo and Navia rivers (or more exactly Eo and Frexulfe rivers). It is called "eonaviego" or "gallego-asturiano" by its speakers.


title: Portuguese language

text: The Fala language, known by its speakers as "xalimés", "mañegu", "a fala de Xálima" and "chapurráu" and in Portuguese as "a fala de Xálima", "a fala da Estremadura", "o galego da Estremadura", "valego" or "galaico-estremenho", is another descendant of Galician-Portuguese, spoken by a small number of people in the Spanish towns of Valverde del Fresno ("Valverdi du Fresnu"), Eljas ("As Ellas") and San Martín de Trevejo ("Sa Martín de Trevellu") in the autonomous community of Extremadura, near the border with Portugal.


title: Portuguese language

text: There are a number of other places in Spain in which the native language of the common people is a descendant of the Galician-Portuguese group, such as La Alamedilla, Cedillo ("Cedilho"), Herrera de Alcántara ("Ferreira d'Alcântara") and Olivenza ("Olivença"), but in these municipalities, what is spoken is actually Portuguese, not disputed as such in the mainstream.


title: Portuguese language

text: The diversity of dialects of the Portuguese language is known since the time of medieval Portuguese-Galician language when it coexisted with the Lusitanian-Mozarabic dialect, spoken in the south of Portugal. The dialectal diversity becomes more evident in the work of Fernão d'Oliveira, in the "Grammatica da Lingoagem Portuguesa", (1536), where he remarks that the people of Portuguese regions of Beira, Alentejo, Estremadura, and Entre Douro e Minho, all speak differently from each other. Also Contador d'Argote (1725) distinguishes three main varieties of dialects: the local dialects, the dialects of time, and of profession (work jargon). Of local dialects he highlights five main dialects: the dialect of Estremadura, of Entre-Douro e Minho, of Beira, of Algarve and of Trás-os-Montes. He also makes reference to the overseas dialects, the rustic dialects, the poetic dialect and that of prose.


title: Portuguese language

text: In the kingdom of Portugal, "Ladinho" (or "Lingoagem Ladinha") was the name given to the pure Portuguese romance language, without any mixture of Aravia or Gerigonça Judenga. While the term "língua vulgar" was used to name the language before D. Dinis decided to call it "Portuguese language", the erudite version used and known as Galician-Portuguese (the language of the Portuguese court) and all other Portuguese dialects were spoken at the same time. In a historical perspective the Portuguese language was never just one dialect. Just like today there is a standard Portuguese (actually two) among the several dialects of Portuguese, in the past there was Galician-Portuguese as the "standard", coexisting with other dialects.


title: Portuguese language

text: Portuguese has provided loanwords to many languages, such as Indonesian, Manado Malay, Malayalam, Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhala, Malay, Bengali, English, Hindi, Swahili, Afrikaans, Konkani, Marathi, Punjabi, Tetum, Xitsonga, Japanese, Lanc-Patuá, Esan, Bandari (spoken in Iran) and Sranan Tongo (spoken in Suriname). It left a strong influence on the "língua brasílica", a Tupi–Guarani language, which was the most widely spoken in Brazil until the 18th century, and on the language spoken around Sikka in Flores Island, Indonesia. In nearby Larantuka, Portuguese is used for prayers in Holy Week rituals.


title: Portuguese language

text: The Japanese–Portuguese dictionary "Nippo Jisho" (1603) was the first dictionary of Japanese in a European language, a product of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan. Building on the work of earlier Portuguese missionaries, the "Dictionarium Anamiticum, Lusitanum et Latinum" (Annamite–Portuguese–Latin dictionary) of Alexandre de Rhodes (1651) introduced the modern orthography of Vietnamese, which is based on the orthography of 17th-century Portuguese. The Romanization of Chinese was also influenced by the Portuguese language (among others), particularly regarding Chinese surnames; one example is "Mei". During 1583–88 Italian Jesuits Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci created a Portuguese–Chinese dictionary – the first ever European–Chinese dictionary.


title: Portuguese language

text: For instance, as Portuguese merchants were presumably the first to introduce the sweet orange in Europe, in several modern Indo-European languages the fruit has been named after them. Some examples are Albanian "portokall", Bosnian (archaic) "portokal", "prtokal", Bulgarian портокал ("portokal"), Greek πορτοκάλι ("portokáli"), Macedonian "", Persian پرتقال ("porteghal"), and Romanian "portocală". Related names can be found in other languages, such as Arabic البرتقال ("burtuqāl"), Georgian ფორთოხალი ("p'ort'oxali"), Turkish "portakal" and Amharic "birtukan". Also, in southern Italian dialects (e.g. Neapolitan), an orange is "portogallo" or "purtuallo", literally "(the) Portuguese (one)", in contrast to standard Italian "arancia".


title: Portuguese language

text: Beginning in the 16th century, the extensive contacts between Portuguese travelers and settlers, African and Asian slaves, and local populations led to the appearance of many pidgins with varying amounts of Portuguese influence.


title: Portuguese language

text: As each of these pidgins became the mother tongue of succeeding generations, they evolved into fully fledged creole languages, which remained in use in many parts of Asia, Africa and South America until the 18th century.


title: Portuguese language

text: Some Portuguese-based or Portuguese-influenced creoles are still spoken today, by over 3 million people worldwide, especially people of partial Portuguese ancestry.


title: Portuguese language

text: Portuguese phonology is similar to those of languages such as Catalan and Franco-Provençal, whereas that of Spanish is similar to those of Sardinian and the Southern Italian dialects. Some would describe the phonology of Portuguese as a blend of Spanish, Gallo-Romance (e.g. French) and the languages of northern Italy (especially Genoese).


title: Portuguese language

text: There is a maximum of 9 oral vowels, 2 semivowels and 21 consonants; though some varieties of the language have fewer phonemes. There are also five nasal vowels, which some linguists regard as allophones of the oral vowels. Galician-Portuguese developed in the region of the former Roman province of Gallaecia, from the Vulgar Latin (common Latin) that had been introduced by Roman soldiers, colonists and magistrates during the time of the Roman Empire. Although the process may have been slower than in other regions, the centuries of contact with Vulgar Latin, after a period of bilingualism, completely extinguished the native languages, leading to the evolution of a new variety of Latin with a few Gallaecian features.


title: Portuguese language

text: Gallaecian and Lusitanian influences were absorbed into the local Vulgar Latin dialect, which can be detected in some Galician-Portuguese words as well as in placenames of Celtic and Iberian origin.


title: Portuguese language

text: An early form of Galician-Portuguese was already spoken in the Kingdom of the Suebi and by the year 800 Galician-Portuguese had already become the vernacular of northwestern Iberia. The first known phonetic changes in Vulgar Latin, which began the evolution to Galician-Portuguese, took place during the rule of the Germanic groups, the Suebi (411–585) and Visigoths (585–711). The Galician-Portuguese "inflected infinitive" (or "personal infinitive") and the nasal vowels may have evolved under the influence of local Celtic (as in Old French). The nasal vowels would thus be a phonologic characteristic of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Roman Gallaecia, but they are not attested in writing until after the 6th and 7th centuries.


title: Portuguese language

text: Like Catalan and German, Portuguese uses vowel quality to contrast stressed syllables with unstressed syllables. Unstressed isolated vowels tend to be raised and sometimes centralized.


title: Portuguese language

text: A notable aspect of the grammar of Portuguese is the verb. Morphologically, more verbal inflections from classical Latin have been preserved by Portuguese than by any other major Romance language. Portuguese and Spanish share very similar grammar. Portuguese also has some grammatical innovations not found in other Romance languages (except Galician and Fala):


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (M270 MLRS) is an American-developed armored, self-propelled, multiple rocket launcher.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The U.S. Army variant of the MLRS vehicle is based on the chassis of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The first M270s were delivered in 1983. The MLRS were subsequently adopted by several NATO countries and other countries. The MLRS first saw service with the United States in the 1991 Gulf War. The MLRS has been upgraded to fire guided missiles, and has been used by Ukraine in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union had a clear advantage over U.S. and NATO forces in terms of rocket artillery. Soviet tactics of bombardment by large numbers of truck-mounted multiple rocket launchers (MRLs), such as the BM-21, would saturate a target area with thousands of rockets, ensuring some would hit specific targets while delivering a psychological impact. By contrast, U.S. artillerists favored cannon artillery for its relative accuracy and ammunition conservation over "area fire" rockets, and as a result were left with only a small amount of World War II vintage rocket artillery.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: This mindset began to change following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which saw high loss rates, especially from rear-area weapons like surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), as well as the effective Israeli tactic of hitting such sites with MRLs. This combined with the realization that such an experience would happen on a larger scale in the event of war in Europe. It would be used to engage enemy air defenses and for counterbattery fire, freeing cannon units to provide close support for ground forces.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The MLRS was conceived as the General Support Rocket System (GSRS). In December 1975, the U.S. Army Missile Command issued a request for proposal to industry to assist in determining the best technical approach for the GSRS. In March 1976, the Army awarded contracts to Boeing, Emerson Electric, Martin Marietta, Northrup and Vought to explore the concept definition of the GSRS. In September 1977, Boeing Aerospace and Vought were awarded contracts to develop prototypes of the GSRS. In 1978, the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command made changes to the program so that the GSRS could be manufactured in Europe. This was to allow European nations, who had been independently pursuing their own MLRS programs, to buy in to the program. In July 1979, the United States, West Germany, France and the United Kingdom signed a memorandum of understanding for joint development and production of GSRS. In November 1979, GSRS was accordingly redesignated the Multiple Launch Rocket System. Both competitors delivered three MLRS prototypes to the Army. The Army evaluated the MLRS prototypes from December 1979 – February 1980. The Army selected the Vought system in May 1980. Vought began low-rate initial production in early 1982. The first production models were delivered in August 1982. The first units were delivered to the 1st Infantry Division in early 1983. The first operational M270 battery was formed in March 1983, and the first unit was sent to West Germany that September.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: European nations produced 287 MLRS systems, with the first being delivered in 1989. Some 1,300 M270 systems have been manufactured in the United States and in Western Europe, along with more than 700,000 rockets.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The M270 MLRS weapons system is collectively known as the M270 MLRS Self-Propelled Loader/Launcher (SPLL). The SPLL is composed of three primary subsystems: the M269 Loader Launcher Module (LLM), which also houses the electronic Fire Control System, is mated to the M993 Carrier Vehicle.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The M993 is the designation of the M987 carrier when it is used in the MLRS. The M987/M993 is a lengthened derivative of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle chassis. The ground contact length is increased from to . Originally called the Fighting Vehicle System, the M987 chassis was designed to serve as the basis for many other vehicles. These included the XM1070 Electronic Fighting Vehicle, the M4 Command and Control Vehicle, the Armored Treatment and Transport Vehicle and the Forward Area Armored Logistics System (encompassing three vehicles including the XM1007 AFARV rearm vehicle.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The original GSRS plan called for 210 mm diameter rockets. After European allies became involved with the project, these were replaced with 227 mm rockets in order to accommodate the AT2 mine.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: Cold War doctrine for the M270 was for the vehicles to spread out individually and hide until needed, then move to a firing position and launch their rockets, immediately move away to a reloading point, then move to a completely new hiding position near a different firing point. These shoot-and-scoot tactics were planned to avoid susceptibility to Soviet counterbattery fire. One M270 firing 12 M26 rockets would drop 7,728 bomblets, and one MLRS battery of nine launchers firing 108 rockets had the equivalent firepower of 33 battalions of cannon artillery.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The system can fire rockets or MGM-140 ATACMS missiles, which are contained in interchangeable pods. Each pod contains six standard rockets or one guided ATACMS missile; the two types cannot be mixed. The LLM can hold two pods at a time, which are hand-loaded using an integrated winch system. All twelve rockets or two ATACMS missiles can be fired in under a minute. One launcher firing twelve rockets can completely blanket one square kilometer with submunitions. A typical MLRS cluster salvo consisted of three M270 vehicles each firing all 12 rockets. With each rocket containing 644 M77 grenades, the entire salvo would drop 23,184 grenades in the target area. However, with a two percent dud rate, that would leave approximately 400 undetonated bombs scattered over the area, which could endanger friendly troops and civilians.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: Production of the M270 ended in 2003, when a last batch was delivered to the Egyptian Army. In 2003, the U.S. Army began low-rate production of the M142 HIMARS. The HIMARS fires all of the munitions of the MLRS, but is based on the chassis of the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles. As of 2012, BAE Systems still had the capability to restart production of the MLRS.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: In 2006, MLRS was upgraded to fire guided rounds. Phase I testing of a guided unitary round (XM31) was completed on an accelerated schedule in March 2006. Due to an Urgent Need Statement, the guided unitary round was quickly fielded and used in action in Iraq. Lockheed Martin also received a contract to convert existing M30 Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munition (DPICM) GMLRS rockets to the XM31 unitary variant.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The M31 GMLRS Unitary rocket transformed the M270 into a point target artillery system for the first time. Due to GPS guidance and a single high-explosive warhead, the M31 could hit targets accurately with less chance of collateral damage while needing fewer rockets to be fired, reducing logistical requirements. The unitary warhead also made the MLRS able to be used in urban environments. The M31 had a dual-mode fuse with point detonation and delay options to defeat soft targets and lightly fortified bunkers respectively, with the upgraded M31A1 equipped with a multi-mode fuse adding a proximity airburst mode for use against personnel in the open; proximity mode can be set for Height Of Burst (HOB). The GMLRS has a minimum engagement range of and can hit a target out to , impacting at a speed of Mach 2.5.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: A German developmental artillery system, called the Artillery Gun Module, has used the MLRS chassis on its developmental vehicles.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: In 2012, a contract was issued to improve the armor of the M270s and improve the fire control to the standards of the M142 HIMARS. In June 2015, the M270A1 conducted tests of firing rockets after upgrades from the Improved Armored Cab project, which provides the vehicle with an enhanced armored cab and windows.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: In early March 2021, Lockheed announced they had successfully fired an extended-range version of the GMLRS out to , part of an effort to increase the rocket's range to . Later in March the ER-GMLRS was fired out to .


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: When first deployed with the U.S. Army, the MLRS was used in a composite battalion consisting of two batteries of traditional artillery (howitzers) and one battery of MLRS SPLLs (self-propelled loader/launchers). The first operational Battery was C Battery, 3rd Battalion, 6th Field Artillery, 1st Infantry Division (Ft. Riley, Kansas) in 1982. The first operational organic or "all MLRS" unit was 6th Battalion, 27th Field Artillery.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: Originally, a battery consisted of three platoons with three launchers each for nine launchers per battery; by 1987, 25 MLRS batteries were in service. In the 1990s, a battery was reduced to six launchers.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The 6th Battalion, 27th Field Artillery was reactivated as the Army's first Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) battalion in October 1984, and became known as the "Rocket Busters". In March 1990, the unit deployed to White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico to conduct the Initial Operational Test and Evaluation of the Army Tactical Missile System. The success of the test provided the Army with a highly accurate, long range fire support asset.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The first combat use of the MLRS occurred in the Gulf War. The U.S. deployed over 230 MLRS systems during Operation Desert Storm, and the UK an additional 16.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: In September 1990, the 6th Battalion, 27th Field Artillery deployed to Saudi Arabia in support of Operation Desert Shield. Assigned to the XVIII Airborne Corps Artillery, the unit played a critical role in the early defense of Saudi Arabia. As Desert Shield turned into Desert Storm, the Battalion was the first U.S. Field Artillery unit to fire into Iraq. Over the course of the war, the 6th Battalion, 27th Field Artillery provided timely and accurate rocket and missile fires for both U.S. corps in the theater, the 82nd Airborne Division, the 6th French Light Armored Division, the 1st Armored, 1st Infantry Division, the 101st Airborne Division, and the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized).


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: A Battery 92nd Field Artillery (MLRS) was deployed to the Gulf War in 1990 from Ft. Hood Texas. 3/27th FA (MLRS) out of Fort Bragg deployed in support of Operation Desert Shield in August 1990. A/21st Field Artillery (MLRS) – 1st Cavalry Division Artillery deployed in support of Operation Desert Shield in September 1990. In December 1990, A-40th Field Artillery (MLRS) – 3rd Armored Division Artillery (Hanau), 1/27th FA (MLRS) part of the 41st Field Artillery Brigade (Babenhausen) and 4/27th FA (MLRS) (Wertheim) deployed in support of Operation Desert Shield from their bases in Germany and 1/158th Field Artillery from the Oklahoma Army National Guard deployed in January 1991.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: MLRS launchers were deployed during Operation Desert Storm. Its first use was on 18 January 1991, when Battery A of the 6th Battalion, 27th Field Artillery fired eight ATACMS missiles at Iraqi SAM sites. In one engagement, three MLRS batteries fired 287 rockets at 24 separate targets in less than five minutes, an amount that would have taken a cannon battalion over an hour to fire. In early February 1991, 4-27 FA launched the biggest MLRS night fire mission in history, firing 312 rockets in a single mission. When ground operations began on 24 February 1991, 414 rockets were fired as the U.S. VII Corps advanced. Out of the 57,000 artillery rounds fired by the end of the war, 6,000 were MLRS rockets plus 32 ATACMS.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The MLRS has since been used in numerous military engagements, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In March 2007, the British Ministry of Defence decided to send a troop of MLRS to support ongoing operations in Afghanistan's southern province of Helmand; they would use newly developed guided munitions.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The first use of the GMLRS was in September 2005 in Iraq, when two rockets were fired in Tal Afar over and hit insurgent strongholds, killing 48 Iraqi fighters.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: In April 2011, the first modernized MLRS II and M31 GMLRS rocket were handed over to the German Army's Artillery School in Idar Oberstein. The German Army operates the M31 rocket up to a range of .


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States considered sending the MLRS as part of military aid to Ukraine. Concerns were raised that this system could be used to hit targets inside Russia. US President Joe Biden initially declined to send it to Ukraine, but on May 31 he announced that the M142 HIMARS, another vehicle capable of firing GMLRS rockets, would be supplied.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: On 7 June 2022, British defence secretary Ben Wallace announced that the UK would send three (later increased to six) MLRS to aid Ukrainian forces. On 15 June, Germany announced it would send three of its MARS vehicles from German Army stocks.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: Ukraine announced they had received the first M270s on 15 July. The German defence secretary Christine Lambrecht announced the arrival of the vehicles they contributed on 26 July 2022, and on 15 September Lambrecht announced that Germany would transfer two more.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The M270 system can fire MLRS Family Of Munition (MFOM) rockets and artillery missiles, which are manufactured and used by a number of platforms and countries. These include:


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: M26 and M28 rocket production began in 1980. Until 2005 they were the only rockets available for the M270 system. When production of the M26 series ceased in 2001 a total of 506,718 rockets had been produced. Each rocket pod contains 6 identical rockets. M26 rockets and its derivatives were removed from the US Army's active inventory in June 2009, due to their submunitions not satisfying a July 2008 Department of Defense policy directive on cluster munitions issued under President George W. Bush that US cluster munitions that result in a rate of more than a 1% of unexploded ordnance must be destroyed by the end of 2018. (The United States is not a party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions which prohibits them). In November 2017, the Trump administration replaced the July 2008 policy directive on cluster munitions with a new policy directive, which abandoned the requirement to destroy cluster munitions by the end of 2018 and gave Unified Combatant Command commanders the authority to approve employing cluster munitions. The last use of M26 rockets occurred during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) rockets have an extended range and add GPS-aided guidance to their inertial navigation system. Flight control is accomplished by four forward-mounted canards driven by electromechanical actuators. GMLRS rockets were introduced in 2005 and can be fired from the M270A1 and M270A2, the European M270A1 variants (British Army M270B1, German Army MARS II, French Army Lance Roquette Unitaire (LRU), Italian Army MLRS Improved (MLRS-I), Finnish Army M270D1), and the lighter M142. M30 and M31 rockets are, except for their warheads, identical. By December 2021, 50,000 GMLRS rockets had been produced, with yearly production then exceeding 9,000 rockets. Each rocket pod contains 6 identical rockets.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) is a series of 610 mm surface-to-surface missile (SSM) with a range of up to . Each rocket pod contains one ATACMS missile. As of 2022 only the M48, M57, and M57E1 remain in the US military's active inventory.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: The Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) is a new series of GPS-guided missiles, which will begin to replace ATACMS missiles from 2024. PrSM carries a newly designed area-effects warhead and has a range of . PrSM missiles can be launched from the M270A2 and the M142, with rockets pods containing 2 missiles. As of 2022 the PrSM is in low rate initial production with 110 missiles being delivered to the US military over the year. PrSM will enter operational service in 2023.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: Turkey, in order to obtain M26 supplies without the agreement of the U.S. and because the U.S. was reluctant to share technologies, started reverse-engineering M26 rockets under the SAGE 227 project in order to have its own supply of rockets. During the SAGE-227 project A/B/C/D medium-range composite-fuel artillery rocket and SAGE-227 F experimental guided rocket were developed.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: Israel developed its own rockets to be used in the "Menatetz", an upgraded version of the M270 MLRS. The rockets are developed and manufactured by IMI Systems.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: In April 2012, Lockheed Martin received a $79.4 million contract to develop a GMLRS incorporating an Alliant Techsystems-designed alternative warhead to replace DPICM cluster warheads. The AW version is designed as a drop-in replacement with little modification needed to existing rockets. An Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) program was to last 36 months, with the alternative warhead GMLRS expected to enter service in late 2016. The AW warhead is a large airburst fragmentation warhead that explodes over a target area to disperse penetrating projectiles. Considerable damage is caused to a large area while leaving behind only solid metal penetrators and inert rocket fragments from a warhead containing approximately 182,000 preformed tungsten fragments. The unitary GMLRS also has an airburst option, but while it produces a large blast and pieces of shrapnel, the AW round's small pellets cover a larger area.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: On 22 May 2013, Lockheed and ATK test fired a GMLRS rocket with a new cluster munition warhead developed under the Alternative Warhead Program (AWP), aimed at producing a drop-in replacement for DPICM bomblets in M30 guided rockets. It was fired by an M142 HIMARS and traveled before detonating. The AWP warhead will have equal or greater effect against materiel and personnel targets, while leaving no unexploded ordnance behind.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: In October 2013, Lockheed conducted the third and final engineering development test flight of the GMLRS alternative warhead. Three rockets were fired from away and destroyed their ground targets. The Alternative Warhead Program then moved to production qualification testing. The fifth and final Production Qualification Test (PQT) for the AW GMLRS was conducted in April 2014, firing four rockets from a HIMARS at targets away.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: In July 2014, Lockheed successfully completed all Developmental Test/Operational Test (DT/OT) flight tests for the AW GMLRS. They were the first tests conducted with soldiers operating the fire control system, firing rockets at mid and long-range from a HIMARS. The Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E) exercise was to be conducted in fall 2014.


title: M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System

text: In September 2015, Lockheed received a contract for Lot 10 production of the GMLRS unitary rocket, which includes the first order for AW production.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Ukrainian (, ) is an East Slavic language of the Indo-European language family. It is the native language of about 40 million people and the official state language of Ukraine in Eastern Europe. Written Ukrainian uses the Ukrainian alphabet, a variant of the Cyrillic script. The standard Ukrainian language is regulated by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NANU; particularly by its Institute for the Ukrainian Language), the Ukrainian language-information fund, and Potebnia Institute of Linguistics. Comparisons are often drawn to Russian, a prominent Slavic language, but there is more mutual intelligibility with Belarusian, Ukrainian's closest relative.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Historical linguists trace the origin of the Ukrainian language to Old East Slavic, a language of the early medieval state of Kyivan Rus'. Modern linguistics denies the existence of a stage of a common East Slavic language, therefore, referring the Ukrainian language to "East Slavonic" is also more of a tribute to the academic tradition. After the fall of the Kyivan Rus' as well as the Kingdom of Ruthenia, the language developed into a form called the Ruthenian language, and enjoyed as such the status of one of the official languages of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania for several centuries. Along with Ruthenian, in the territory of modern Ukraine, the Kyiv version ("Kyiv Izvod") of Church Slavonic was also used in liturgical services.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The Ukrainian language has been in common use since the late 17th century, associated with the establishment of the Cossack Hetmanate. From 1804 until the 1917–1921 Ukrainian War of Independence, the Ukrainian language was banned from schools in the Russian Empire, of which the biggest part of Ukraine (Central, Eastern and Southern) was a part at the time. Through folk songs, itinerant musicians, and prominent authors, the language has always maintained a sufficient base in Western Ukraine, where the language was never banned.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Specifically Ukrainian developments that led to a gradual change of the Old East Slavic vowel system into the system found in modern Ukrainian began approximately in the 12th/13th century (that is, still at the time of the Kyivan Rus') with a lengthening and raising of the Old East Slavic mid vowels "e" and "o" when followed by a consonant and a weak yer vowel that would eventually disappear completely, for example Old East Slavic котъ /kɔtə/ > Ukrainian кіт /kit/ 'cat' (via transitional stages such as /koˑtə̆/, /kuˑt(ə̆)/, /kyˑt/ or similar) or Old East Slavic печь /pʲɛtʃʲə/ > Ukrainian піч /pitʃ/ 'oven' (via transitional stages such as /pʲeˑtʃʲə̆/, /pʲiˑtʃʲ/ or similar). This raising and other phonological developments of the time, such as the merger of the Old East Slavic vowel phonemes и /i/ and ы /ɨ/ into the specifically Ukrainian phoneme /ɪ ~ e/, spelled with и (in the 13th/14th centuries), and the fricativisation of the Old East Slavic consonant г /g/, probably first to /ɣ/ (in the 13th century), with the result /ɦ/ in Modern Ukrainian, never happened in Russian, and only the fricativisation of Old East Slavic г /g/ occurred in Belarusian, where the result is /ɣ/.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The first theory of the origin of the Ukrainian language was suggested in Imperial Russia in the middle of the 18th century by Mikhail Lomonosov. This theory posits the existence of a common language spoken by all East Slavic people in the time of the Rus'. According to Lomonosov, the differences that subsequently developed between Great Russian and Ukrainian (which he referred to as Little Russian) could be explained by the influence of the Polish and Slovak languages on Ukrainian and the influence of Uralic languages on Russian from the 13th to the 17th centuries.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Another point of view was developed during the 19th and 20th centuries by other linguists of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Like Lomonosov, they assumed the existence of a common language spoken by East Slavs in the past. But unlike Lomonosov's hypothesis, this theory does not view "Polonization" or any other external influence as the main driving force that led to the formation of three different languages (Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian) from the common Old East Slavic language. The supporters of this theory disagree, however, about the time when the different languages were formed.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Soviet scholars set the divergence between Ukrainian and Russian only at later time periods (14th through 16th centuries). According to this view, Old East Slavic diverged into Belarusian and Ukrainian to the west (collectively, the Ruthenian language of the 15th to 18th centuries), and Old East Slavic to the north-east, after the political boundaries of the Kyivan Rus' were redrawn in the 14th century.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Some researchers, while admitting the differences between the dialects spoken by East Slavic tribes in the 10th and 11th centuries, still consider them as "regional manifestations of a common language".


title: Ukrainian language

text: In contrast, Ahatanhel Krymsky and Aleksey Shakhmatov assumed the existence of the common spoken language of Eastern Slavs only in prehistoric times. According to their point of view, the diversification of the Old East Slavic language took place in the 8th or early 9th century.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak stated that the Old Novgorod dialect differed significantly from that of other dialects of Kyivan Rus' during the 11th–12th century, but


title: Ukrainian language

text: started becoming more similar to them around 13th–15th centuries. The modern Russian language hence developed from the fusion of this Novgorod dialect and the common dialect spoken by the other Kyivan Rus', whereas the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian languages developed from the dialects which did not differ from each other in a significant way.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Some Ukrainian features were recognizable in the southern dialects of Old East Slavic as far back as the language can be documented.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Ukrainian linguist Stepan Smal-Stotsky denies the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. Similar points of view were shared by Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo, Ivan Ohienko and others. According to this theory, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages during the 6th through 9th centuries. The Ukrainian language was formed by convergence of tribal dialects, mostly due to an intensive migration of the population within the territory of today's Ukraine in later historical periods. This point of view was also supported by George Shevelov's phonological studies.


title: Ukrainian language

text: As a result of close Slavic contacts with the remnants of the Scythian and Sarmatian population north of the Black Sea, lasting into the early Middle Ages, the appearance of the voiced fricative γ/г (romanized "h"), in modern Ukrainian and some southern Russian dialects is explained by the assumption that it initially emerged in Scythian and related eastern Iranian dialects, from earlier common Proto-Indo-European "*g" and "*gʰ".


title: Ukrainian language

text: During the 13th century, when German settlers were invited to Ukraine by the princes of the Kingdom of Ruthenia, German words began to appear in the language spoken in Ukraine. Their influence would continue under Poland not only through German colonists but also through the Yiddish-speaking Jews. Often such words involve trade or handicrafts. Examples of words of German or Yiddish origin spoken in Ukraine include "dakh" (roof), "rura" (pipe), "rynok" (market), "kushnir" (furrier), and "majster" (master or craftsman).


title: Ukrainian language

text: In the 13th century, eastern parts of Rus (including Moscow) came under Tatar rule until their unification under the Tsardom of Muscovy, whereas the south-western areas (including Kyiv) were incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. For the following four centuries, the languages of the two regions evolved in relative isolation from each other. Direct written evidence of the existence of the Ukrainian language dates to the late 16th century. By the 16th century, a peculiar official language formed: a mixture of the liturgical standardised language of Old Church Slavonic, Ruthenian and Polish. The influence of the latter gradually increased relative to the former two, as the nobility and rural large-landowning class, known as the szlachta, was largely Polish-speaking. Documents soon took on many Polish characteristics superimposed on Ruthenian phonetics.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Polish rule and education also involved significant exposure to the Latin language. Much of the influence of Poland on the development of the Ukrainian language has been attributed to this period and is reflected in multiple words and constructions used in everyday Ukrainian speech that were taken from Polish or Latin. Examples of Polish words adopted from this period include "zavzhdy" (always; taken from old Polish word "zawżdy") and "obitsiaty" (to promise; taken from Polish "obiecać") and from Latin (via Polish) "raptom" (suddenly) and "meta" (aim or goal).


title: Ukrainian language

text: Significant contact with Tatars and Turks resulted in many Turkic words, particularly those involving military matters and steppe industry, being adopted into the Ukrainian language. Examples include "torba" (bag) and "tyutyun" (tobacco).


title: Ukrainian language

text: Due to heavy borrowings from Polish, German, Czech and Latin, early modern vernacular Ukrainian ("prosta mova", "simple speech") had more lexical similarity with West Slavic languages than with Russian or Church Slavonic. By the mid-17th century, the linguistic divergence between the Ukrainian and Russian languages had become so significant that there was a need for translators during negotiations for the Treaty of Pereyaslav, between Bohdan Khmelnytsky, head of the Zaporozhian Host, and the Russian state.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The accepted chronology of Ukrainian divides the language into Old, Middle, and Modern Ukrainian. George Shevelov explains that much of this is based on the character of contemporary written sources, ultimately reflecting socio-historical developments, and he further subdivides the MU period with Early and Late phases.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Ukraine annually marks the Day of Ukrainian Writing and Language on November 9, the Eastern Orthodox feast day of Nestor the Chronicler.


title: Ukrainian language

text: During the Khazar period, the territory of Ukraine was settled by Iranian (post-Scythian), Turkic (post-Hunnic, proto-Bulgarian), and Uralic (proto-Hungarian) tribes and Slavic tribes. Later, the Varangian ruler Oleg of Novgorod would seize Kyiv and establish the political entity of Kyivan Rus'.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The era of Kyivan Rus is the subject of some linguistic controversy, as the language of much of the literature was purely or heavily Old Church Slavonic. Literary records from Kyivan Rus testify to substantial difference between Russian and Ruthenian form of the Ukrainian language as early as Kyivan Rus time.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Some theorists see an early Ukrainian stage in language development here, calling it Old Ruthenian; others term this era Old East Slavic. Russian theorists tend to amalgamate Rus to the modern nation of Russia, and call this linguistic era Old Russian. However, according to Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak, Novgorod people did not call themselves Rus until the 14th century, calling Rus only Kyiv, Pereiaslav and Chernihiv principalities (the Kyivan Rus state existed till 1240). At the same time as evidenced by the contemporary chronicles, the ruling princes of Kingdom of Ruthenia and Kyiv called themselves "People of Rus" – Ruthenians, and Galicia–Volhynia was called the Kingdom of Ruthenia.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Also according to Andrey Zaliznyak, the Novgorod dialect differed significantly from that of other dialects of Kyivan Rus during the 11th–12th century, but


title: Ukrainian language

text: started becoming more similar to them around 13th–15th centuries. The modern Russian language hence developed from the fusion of this Novgorod dialect and the common dialect spoken by the other Kyivan Rus, whereas the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian languages developed from the dialects which did not differ from each other in a significant way.


title: Ukrainian language

text: After the fall of Kingdom of Ruthenia, Ukrainians mainly fell under the rule of Lithuania and then Poland. Local autonomy of both rule and language was a marked feature of Lithuanian rule. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Old East Slavic became the language of the chancellery and gradually evolved into the Ruthenian language. Polish rule, which came later, was accompanied by a more assimilationist policy. By the 1569 Union of Lublin that formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a significant part of Ukrainian territory was moved from Lithuanian rule to Polish administration, resulting in cultural Polonization and visible attempts to colonize Ukraine by the Polish nobility.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Many Ukrainian nobles were forced to learn the Polish language and convert to Catholicism during that period in order to maintain their lofty aristocratic position. Lower classes were less affected because literacy was common only in the upper class and clergy. The latter were also under significant Polish pressure after the Union with the Catholic Church. Most of the educational system was gradually Polonized. In Ruthenia, the language of administrative documents gradually shifted towards Polish.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The Polish language has had heavy influences on Ukrainian (particularly in Western Ukraine). The southwestern Ukrainian dialects are transitional to Polish. As the Ukrainian language developed further, some borrowings from Tatar and Turkish occurred. Ukrainian culture and language flourished in the sixteenth and first half of the 17th century, when Ukraine was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, albeit in spite of being part of the PLC, not as a result. Among many schools established in that time, the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium (the predecessor of the modern Kyiv-Mohyla Academy), founded by the Moldavian Orthodox Metropolitan Peter Mogila, was the most important. At that time languages were associated more with religions: Catholics spoke Polish, and members of the Orthodox church spoke Ruthenian.


title: Ukrainian language

text: After the Treaty of Pereyaslav, Ukrainian high culture went into a long period of steady decline. In the aftermath, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was taken over by the Russian Empire and closed down later in the 19th century. Most of the remaining Ukrainian schools also switched to Polish or Russian in the territories controlled by these respective countries, which was followed by a new wave of Polonization and Russification of the native nobility. Gradually the official language of Ukrainian provinces under Poland was changed to Polish, while the upper classes in the Russian part of Ukraine used Russian.


title: Ukrainian language

text: During the 19th century, a revival of Ukrainian self-identification manifested in the literary classes of both Russian-Empire Dnieper Ukraine and Austrian Galicia. The Brotherhood of Sts Cyril and Methodius in Kyiv applied an old word for the Cossack motherland, "Ukrajina", as a self-appellation for the nation of Ukrainians, and "Ukrajins'ka mova" for the language. Many writers published works in the Romantic tradition of Europe demonstrating that Ukrainian was not merely a language of the village but suitable for literary pursuits.


title: Ukrainian language

text: However, in the Russian Empire expressions of Ukrainian culture and especially language were repeatedly persecuted for fear that a self-aware Ukrainian nation would threaten the unity of the empire. In 1804 Ukrainian as a subject and language of instruction was banned from schools. In 1811 by the Order of the Russian government, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was closed. The academy had been open since 1632 and was the first university in Eastern Europe.


title: Ukrainian language

text: In 1847 the Brotherhood of Sts Cyril and Methodius was terminated. The same year Taras Shevchenko was arrested, exiled for ten years, and banned for political reasons from writing and painting. In 1862 Pavlo Chubynsky was exiled for seven years to Arkhangelsk. The Ukrainian magazine "Osnova" was discontinued. In 1863, the tsarist interior minister Pyotr Valuyev proclaimed in his decree that "there never has been, is not, and never can be a separate Little Russian language".


title: Ukrainian language

text: A following ban on Ukrainian books led to Alexander II's secret Ems Ukaz, which prohibited publication and importation of most Ukrainian-language books, public performances and lectures, and even banned the printing of Ukrainian texts accompanying musical scores. A period of leniency after 1905 was followed by another strict ban in 1914, which also affected Russian-occupied Galicia.


title: Ukrainian language

text: For much of the 19th century the Austrian authorities demonstrated some preference for Polish culture, but the Ukrainians were relatively free to partake in their own cultural pursuits in Halychyna and Bukovina, where Ukrainian was widely used in education and official documents. The suppression by Russia hampered the literary development of the Ukrainian language in Dnipro Ukraine, but there was a constant exchange with Halychyna, and many works were published under Austria and smuggled to the east.


title: Ukrainian language

text: By the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of Austro-Hungary in 1918, Ukrainians were ready to openly develop a body of national literature, institute a Ukrainian-language educational system, and form an independent state (the Ukrainian People's Republic, shortly joined by the West Ukrainian People's Republic). During this brief independent statehood the stature and use of Ukrainian greatly improved.


title: Ukrainian language

text: In the Russian Empire Census of 1897 the following picture emerged, with Ukrainian being the second most spoken language of the Russian Empire. According to the Imperial census's terminology, the Russian language ("Русскій") was subdivided into Ukrainian (Малорусскій, 'Little Russian'), what is known as Russian today (Великорусскій, 'Great Russian'), and Belarusian (Бѣлорусскій, 'White Russian').


title: Ukrainian language

text: The following table shows the distribution of settlement by native language (""по родному языку"") in 1897 in Russian Empire governorates ("guberniyas") that had more than 100,000 Ukrainian speakers.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Although in the rural regions of the Ukrainian provinces, 80% of the inhabitants said that Ukrainian was their native language in the Census of 1897 (for which the results are given above), in the urban regions only 32.5% of the population claimed Ukrainian as their native language. For example, in Odessa (then part of the Russian Empire), at the time the largest city in the territory of current Ukraine, only 5.6% of the population said Ukrainian was their native language.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Until the 1920s the urban population in Ukraine grew faster than the number of Ukrainian speakers. This implies that there was a (relative) decline in the use of Ukrainian language. For example, in Kyiv, the number of people stating that Ukrainian was their native language declined from 30.3% in 1874 to 16.6% in 1917.


title: Ukrainian language

text: During the seven-decade-long Soviet era, the Ukrainian language held the formal position of the principal local language in the Ukrainian SSR. However, practice was often a different story: Ukrainian always had to compete with Russian, and the attitudes of the Soviet leadership towards Ukrainian varied from encouragement and tolerance to de facto banishment.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Officially, there was no state language in the Soviet Union until the very end when it was proclaimed in 1990 that Russian language was the all-Union state language and that the constituent republics had rights to declare additional state languages within their jurisdictions. Still it was implicitly understood in the hopes of minority nations that Ukrainian would be used in the Ukrainian SSR, Uzbek would be used in the Uzbek SSR, and so on. However, Russian was used in all parts of the Soviet Union and a special term, "a language of inter-ethnic communication", was coined to denote its status.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Following the Russian Revolution, the Russian Empire was broken up. In different parts of the former empire, several nations, including Ukrainians, developed a renewed sense of national identity. In the chaotic post-revolutionary years the Ukrainian language gained some usage in government affairs. Initially, this trend continued under the Bolshevik government of the Soviet Union, which in a political struggle to retain its grip over the territory had to encourage the national movements of the former Russian Empire. While trying to ascertain and consolidate its power, the Bolshevik government was by far more concerned about many political oppositions connected to the pre-revolutionary order than about the national movements inside the former empire, where it could always find allies.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The widening use of Ukrainian further developed in the first years of Bolshevik rule into a policy called korenizatsiya. The government pursued a policy of Ukrainianization by lifting a ban on the Ukrainian language. That led to the introduction of an impressive education program which allowed Ukrainian-taught classes and raised the literacy of the Ukrainophone population. This policy was led by Education Commissar Mykola Skrypnyk and was directed to approximate the language to Russian.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Newly generated academic efforts from the period of independence were co-opted by the Bolshevik government. The party and government apparatus was mostly Russian-speaking but were encouraged to learn the Ukrainian language. Simultaneously, the newly literate ethnic Ukrainians migrated to the cities, which became rapidly largely Ukrainianized – in both population and in education.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The policy even reached those regions of southern Russian SFSR where the ethnic Ukrainian population was significant, particularly the areas by the Don River and especially Kuban in the North Caucasus. Ukrainian language teachers, just graduated from expanded institutions of higher education in Soviet Ukraine, were dispatched to these regions to staff newly opened Ukrainian schools or to teach Ukrainian as a second language in Russian schools. A string of local Ukrainian-language publications were started and departments of Ukrainian studies were opened in colleges. Overall, these policies were implemented in thirty-five raions (administrative districts) in southern Russia.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Soviet policy towards the Ukrainian language changed abruptly in late 1932 and early 1933, with the termination of the policy of Ukrainianization. In December 1932, the regional party cells received a telegram signed by V. Molotov and Stalin with an order to immediately reverse the Ukrainianization policies. The telegram condemned Ukrainianization as ill-considered and harmful and demanded to "immediately halt Ukrainianization in raions (districts), switch all Ukrainianized newspapers, books and publications into Russian and prepare by autumn of 1933 for the switching of schools and instruction into Russian".


title: Ukrainian language

text: Western and most contemporary Ukrainian historians emphasize that the cultural repression was applied earlier and more fiercely in Ukraine than in other parts of the Soviet Union, and were therefore anti-Ukrainian; others assert that Stalin's goal was the generic crushing of any dissent, rather than targeting the Ukrainians in particular.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Stalinist policies shifted to define Russian as the language of (inter-ethnic) communication. Although Ukrainian continued to be used (in print, education, radio and later television programs), it lost its primary place in advanced learning and republic-wide media. Ukrainian was demoted to a language of secondary importance, often associated with the rise in Ukrainian self-awareness and nationalism and often branded "politically incorrect". The new Soviet Constitution adopted in 1936, however, stipulated that teaching in schools should be conducted in native languages.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Major repression started in 1929–30, when a large group of Ukrainian intelligentsia was arrested and most were executed. In Ukrainian history, this group is often referred to as "Executed Renaissance" (Ukrainian: розстріляне відродження). "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism" was declared to be the primary problem in Ukraine. The terror peaked in 1933, four to five years before the Soviet-wide "Great Purge", which, for Ukraine, was a second blow. The vast majority of leading scholars and cultural leaders of Ukraine were liquidated, as were the "Ukrainianized" and "Ukrainianizing" portions of the Communist party.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Soviet Ukraine's autonomy was completely destroyed by the late 1930s. In its place, the glorification of Russia as the first nation to throw off the capitalist yoke had begun, accompanied by the migration of Russian workers into parts of Ukraine which were undergoing industrialization and mandatory instruction of classic Russian language and literature. Ideologists warned of over-glorifying Ukraine's Cossack past, and supported the closing of Ukrainian cultural institutions and literary publications. The systematic assault upon Ukrainian identity in culture and education, combined with effects of an artificial famine ("Holodomor") upon the peasantry—the backbone of the nation—dealt Ukrainian language and identity a crippling blow.


title: Ukrainian language

text: This sequence of policy change was repeated in Western Ukraine when it was incorporated into Soviet Ukraine. In 1939, and again in the late 1940s, a policy of Ukrainianization was implemented. By the early 1950s, Ukrainian was persecuted and a campaign of Russification began.


title: Ukrainian language

text: After the death of Stalin (1953), a general policy of relaxing the language policies of the past was implemented (1958 to 1963). The Khrushchev era which followed saw a policy of relatively lenient concessions to development of the languages at the local and republic level, though its results in Ukraine did not go nearly as far as those of the Soviet policy of Ukrainianization in the 1920s. Journals and encyclopedic publications advanced in the Ukrainian language during the Khrushchev era, as well as transfer of Crimea under Ukrainian SSR jurisdiction.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Yet, the 1958 school reform that allowed parents to choose the language of primary instruction for their children, unpopular among the circles of the national intelligentsia in parts of the USSR, meant that non-Russian languages would slowly give way to Russian in light of the pressures of survival and advancement. The gains of the past, already largely reversed by the Stalin era, were offset by the liberal attitude towards the requirement to study the local languages (the requirement to study Russian remained).


title: Ukrainian language

text: Parents were usually free to choose the language of study of their children (except in few areas where attending the Ukrainian school might have required a long daily commute) and they often chose Russian, which reinforced the resulting Russification. In this sense, some analysts argue that it was not the "oppression" or "persecution", but rather the "lack of protection" against the expansion of Russian language that contributed to the relative decline of Ukrainian in the 1970s and 1980s. According to this view, it was inevitable that successful careers required a good command of Russian, while knowledge of Ukrainian was not vital, so it was common for Ukrainian parents to send their children to Russian-language schools, even though Ukrainian-language schools were usually available.


title: Ukrainian language

text: While in the Russian-language schools within the republic, Ukrainian was supposed to be learned as a second language at comparable level, the instruction of other subjects was in Russian and, as a result, students had a greater command of Russian than Ukrainian on graduation. Additionally, in some areas of the republic, the attitude towards teaching and learning of Ukrainian in schools was relaxed and it was, sometimes, considered a subject of secondary importance and even a waiver from studying it was sometimes given under various, ever expanding, circumstances.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The complete suppression of all expressions of separatism or Ukrainian nationalism also contributed to lessening interest in Ukrainian. Some people who persistently used Ukrainian on a daily basis were often perceived as though they were expressing sympathy towards, or even being members of, the political opposition. This, combined with advantages given by Russian fluency and usage, made Russian the primary language of choice for many Ukrainians, while Ukrainian was more of a hobby. In any event, the mild liberalization in Ukraine and elsewhere was stifled by new suppression of freedoms at the end of the Khrushchev era (1963) when a policy of gradually creeping suppression of Ukrainian was re-instituted.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The next part of the Soviet Ukrainian language policy divides into two eras: first, the Shelest period (early 1960s to early 1970s), which was relatively liberal towards the development of the Ukrainian language. The second era, the policy of Shcherbytsky (early 1970s to early 1990s), was one of gradual suppression of the Ukrainian language.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The Communist Party leader from 1963 to 1972, Petro Shelest, pursued a policy of defending Ukraine's interests within the Soviet Union. He proudly promoted the beauty of the Ukrainian language and developed plans to expand the role of Ukrainian in higher education. He was removed, however, after only a brief tenure, for being too lenient on Ukrainian nationalism.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The new party boss from 1972 to 1989, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, purged the local party, was fierce in suppressing dissent, and insisted Russian be spoken at all official functions, even at local levels. His policy of Russification was lessened only slightly after 1985.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The management of dissent by the local Ukrainian Communist Party was more fierce and thorough than in other parts of the Soviet Union. As a result, at the start of the Mikhail Gorbachev reforms perebudova and hlasnist’ (Ukrainian for "perestroika" and "glasnost"), Ukraine under Shcherbytsky was slower to liberalize than Russia itself.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Although Ukrainian still remained the native language for the majority in the nation on the eve of Ukrainian independence, a significant share of ethnic Ukrainians were russified. In Donetsk there were no Ukrainian language schools and in Kyiv only a quarter of children went to Ukrainian language schools.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The Russian language was the dominant vehicle, not just of government function, but of the media, commerce, and modernity itself. This was substantially less the case for western Ukraine, which escaped the artificial famine, Great Purge, and most of Stalinism. And this region became the center of a hearty, if only partial, renaissance of the Ukrainian language during independence.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Since 1991, Ukrainian has been the official state language in Ukraine, and the state administration implemented government policies to broaden the use of Ukrainian. The educational system in Ukraine has been transformed over the first decade of independence from a system that is partly Ukrainian to one that is overwhelmingly so. The government has also mandated a progressively increased role for Ukrainian in the media and commerce.


title: Ukrainian language

text: In some cases the abrupt changing of the language of instruction in institutions of secondary and higher education led to the charges of Ukrainianization, raised mostly by the Russian-speaking population. This transition, however, lacked most of the controversies that arose during the de-russification of the other former Soviet Republics.


title: Ukrainian language

text: With time, most residents, including ethnic Russians, people of mixed origin, and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, started to self-identify as Ukrainian nationals, even those who remained Russophone. The Russian language, however, still dominates the print media in most of Ukraine and private radio and TV broadcasting in the eastern, southern, and, to a lesser degree, central regions. The state-controlled broadcast media have become exclusively Ukrainian. There are few obstacles to the usage of Russian in commerce and it is still occasionally used in government affairs.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Late 20th-century Russian politicians like Alexander Lebed and Mikhail Yuryev still claimed that Ukrainian is a Russian dialect.


title: Ukrainian language

text: In the 2001 census, 67.5% of the country's population named Ukrainian as their native language (a 2.8% increase from 1989), while 29.6% named Russian (a 3.2% decrease). For many Ukrainians (of various ethnic origins), the term "native language" may not necessarily associate with the language they use more frequently. The overwhelming majority of ethnic Ukrainians consider the Ukrainian language "native", including those who often speak Russian.


title: Ukrainian language

text: According to the official 2001 census data, 92.3% of Kyiv region population responded "Ukrainian" to the "native language" ("ridna mova") census question, compared with 88.4% in 1989, and 7.2% responded "Russian". The part of other languages, specified like mother tongue was 0.5%. On the other hand, when the question "What language do you use in everyday life?" was asked in the sociological survey, the Kyivans' answers were distributed as follows: "mostly Russian": 52%, "both Russian and Ukrainian in equal measure": 32%, "mostly Ukrainian": 14%, "exclusively Ukrainian": 4.3%.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Ethnic minorities, such as Romanians, Tatars and Jews usually use Russian as their lingua franca. But there are tendencies within these minority groups to use Ukrainian. The Jewish writer Olexander Beyderman from the mainly Russian-speaking city of Odessa is now writing most of his dramas in Ukrainian. The emotional relationship regarding Ukrainian is changing in southern and eastern areas.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Opposition to expansion of Ukrainian-language teaching is a matter of contention in eastern regions closer to Russia – in May 2008, the Donetsk city council prohibited the creation of any new Ukrainian schools in the city in which 80% of them are Russian-language schools.


title: Ukrainian language

text: In 2019, the law "On supporting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the State language" was approved by the Ukrainian parliament, formalizing rules governing the usage of Ukrainian and introducing penalties for violations. For its enforcement the office of Language ombudsman was introduced.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The literary Ukrainian language, which was preceded by Old East Slavic literature, may be subdivided into two stages: during the 12th to 18th centuries what in Ukraine is referred to as "Old Ukrainian", but elsewhere, and in contemporary sources, is known as the Ruthenian language, and from the end of the 18th century to the present what in Ukraine is known as "Modern Ukrainian", but elsewhere is known as just Ukrainian.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Influential literary figures in the development of modern Ukrainian literature include the philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda, Ivan Kotlyarevsky, Mykola Kostomarov, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka. The earliest literary work in the Ukrainian language was recorded in 1798 when Ivan Kotlyarevsky, a playwright from Poltava in southeastern Ukraine, published his epic poem, "Eneyida", a burlesque in Ukrainian, based on Virgil's "Aeneid". His book was published in vernacular Ukrainian in a satirical way to avoid being censored, and is the earliest known Ukrainian published book to survive through Imperial and, later, Soviet policies on the Ukrainian language.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Kotlyarevsky's work and that of another early writer using the Ukrainian vernacular language, Petro Artemovsky, used the southeastern dialect spoken in the Poltava, Kharkiv and southern Kyiven regions of the Russian Empire. This dialect would serve as the basis of the Ukrainian literary language when it was developed by Taras Shevchenko and Panteleimon Kulish in the mid 19th century. In order to raise its status from that of a dialect to that of a language, various elements from folklore and traditional styles were added to it.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The Ukrainian literary language developed further when the Russian state banned the use of the Ukrainian language, prompting many of its writers to move to the western Ukrainian region of Galicia which was under more liberal Austrian rule; after the 1860s the majority of Ukrainian literary works were published in Austrian Galicia. During this period Galician influences were adopted in the Ukrainian literary language, particularly with respect to vocabulary involving law, government, technology, science, and administration.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The use of the Ukrainian language is increasing after a long period of decline. Although there are almost fifty million ethnic Ukrainians worldwide, including 37.5 million in Ukraine in 2001 (77.8% of the total population at the time), the Ukrainian language is prevalent mainly in western and central Ukraine. In Kyiv, both Ukrainian and Russian are spoken, a notable shift from the recent past when the city was primarily Russian-speaking.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The shift is believed to be caused mainly by an influx of migrants from western regions of Ukraine but also by some Kyivans opting to use the language they speak at home more widely in public settings. Public signs and announcements in Kyiv are displayed in Ukrainian. In southern and eastern Ukraine, Russian is the prevalent language in most large and some small cities. According to the Ukrainian Census of 2001, 87.8% of people living in Ukraine were fluent in Ukrainian.


title: Ukrainian language

text: In August 2022, a survey in Ukraine by Rating Group found that 85% said they speak Ukrainian or Ukrainian and Russian at home, 51% only Ukrainian, an increase from 61% and 44% in February 2014. In the same survey, 76% considered Ukrainian their native language (), up from 57% in July 2012, including 30% of Russian-speakers.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Ukrainian has become popular in other countries through movies and songs performed in the Ukrainian language. The most popular Ukrainian rock bands, such as Okean Elzy, Vopli Vidopliassova, BoomBox perform regularly in tours across Europe, Israel, North America and especially Russia. In countries with significant Ukrainian populations, bands singing in the Ukrainian language sometimes reach top places on the charts, such as Enej (a band from Poland). Other notable Ukrainian-language bands are The Ukrainians from the United Kingdom, Klooch from Canada, Ukrainian Village Band from the United States, and the Kuban Cossack Choir from the Kuban region in Russia.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Oleksa Horbach's 1951 study of argots analyzed historical primary sources (argots of professionals, thugs, prisoners, homeless, school children, etc.) paying special attention to etymological features of argots, word formation and borrowing patterns depending on the source-language (Church Slavonic, Russian, Czech, Polish, Romani, Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, German).


title: Ukrainian language

text: All the countries neighbouring Ukraine (except for Hungary) historically have regions with a sizable Ukrainian population and therefore Ukrainian language speakers. Ukrainian is an official minority language in Belarus, Romania, and Moldova.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Ukrainian is also spoken by a large émigrée population, particularly in Canada (see Canadian Ukrainian), the United States, and several countries of South America like Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. The founders of this population primarily emigrated from Galicia, which used to be part of Austro-Hungary before World War I, and belonged to Poland between the World Wars. The language spoken by most of them is the Galician dialect of Ukrainian from the first half of the 20th century. Compared with modern Ukrainian, the vocabulary of Ukrainians outside Ukraine reflects less influence of Russian, but often contains many loanwords from the local language.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Most of the countries where it is spoken are ex-USSR, where many Ukrainians have migrated. Canada and the United States are also home to a large Ukrainian population. Broken up by country (to the nearest thousand):


title: Ukrainian language

text: Ukrainian is a fusional, nominative–accusative, satellite-framed language. It exhibits T–V distinction, and is null-subject. The canonical word order of Ukrainian is SVO. Other word orders are common due to the free word order enabled by Ukrainian's inflectional system.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Ukrainian verbs come in aspect pairs: perfective, and imperfective. Pairs are usually formed by a prepositional prefix and occasionally a root change. The past tense agrees with its subject in number and gender (but "not" person), having developed from the perfect participle.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The Old East Slavic and Russian "o" in syllables ending in a consonant, often correspond to a Ukrainian "i", as in "pod" → "pid" (під, 'under'). Thus, in the declension of nouns, the "o" can re-appear when it is no longer located in a closed syllable, such as "rik" (рік, 'year') (nom): "rotsi" (loc) (році). Similarly, some words can have "і" in some cases when most of the cases have "o", for example "слово" (nominative singular), "слова" (nominative plural) but "слiв" (genitive plural).


title: Ukrainian language

text: Ukrainian case endings are somewhat different from Old East Slavic, and the vocabulary includes a large overlay of Polish terminology. Russian "na pervom etaže" 'on the first floor' is in the locative (prepositional) case. The Ukrainian corresponding expression is "na peršomu poversi" (на першому поверсі). "-omu" is the standard locative (prepositional) ending, but variants in "-im" are common in dialect and poetry, and allowed by the standards bodies. The "kh" of Ukrainian "poverkh" (поверх) has mutated into "s" under the influence of the soft vowel "i" ("k" is similarly mutable into "c" in final positions).


title: Ukrainian language

text: A number of the consonants come in three forms: hard, soft (palatalized) and long, for example, , , and or , , and .


title: Ukrainian language

text: The letter represents the voiced glottal fricative , often transliterated as Latin "h". It is the voiced equivalent of English . Russian speakers from Ukraine often use the soft Ukrainian in place of Russian , which comes from northern dialects of Old East Slavic. The Ukrainian alphabet has the additional letter for , which appears in a few native words such as "gryndžoly" 'sleigh' and "gudzyk" 'button'. However, appears almost exclusively in loan words, and is usually simply written . For example, loanwords from English on public signs usually use for both English "g" and "h".


title: Ukrainian language

text: Another phonetic divergence between the Ukrainian and Russian languages is the pronunciation of Cyrillic "v/w". While in standard Russian it represents , in many Ukrainian dialects it denotes (following a vowel and preceding a consonant (cluster), either within a word or at a word boundary, it denotes the allophone , and like the off-glide in the English words "flow" and "cow", it forms a diphthong with the preceding vowel). Native Russian speakers will pronounce the Ukrainian as , which is one way to tell the two groups apart. As with above, Ukrainians use to render both English "v" and "w"; Russians occasionally use for "w" instead.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Ukrainian is written in a version of Cyrillic, consisting of 33 letters, representing 38 phonemes; an apostrophe is also used. Ukrainian orthography is based on the phonemic principle, with one letter generally corresponding to one phoneme, although there are a number of exceptions. The orthography also has cases where the semantic, historical, and morphological principles are applied.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The modern Ukrainian alphabet is the result of a number of proposed alphabetic reforms from the 19th and early 20th centuries, in Ukraine under the Russian Empire, in Austrian Galicia, and later in Soviet Ukraine. A unified Ukrainian alphabet (the "Skrypnykivka", after Mykola Skrypnyk) was officially established at a 1927 international Orthographic Conference in Kharkiv, during the period of Ukrainization in Soviet Ukraine. But the policy was reversed in the 1930s, and the Soviet Ukrainian orthography diverged from that used by the diaspora. The Ukrainian letter ge "ґ" was banned in the Soviet Union from 1933 until the period of Glasnost in 1990.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The letter щ represents two consonants . The combination of with some of the vowels is also represented by a single letter ( = я, = є, or = ї, = ю), while = йо and the rare regional = йи are written using two letters. These iotated vowel letters and a special soft sign change a preceding consonant from hard to soft. An apostrophe is used to indicate the hardness of the sound in the cases when normally the vowel would change the consonant to soft; in other words, it functions like the yer in the Russian alphabet.


title: Ukrainian language

text: The phonemes and do not have dedicated letters in the alphabet and are rendered with the digraphs дз and дж, respectively. is equivalent to English "ds" in "pods", is equivalent to "j" in "jump".


title: Ukrainian language

text: Spelling search, which began in the late 18th century with the emergence of modern literary language, led to the emergence of several spelling options. In particular, there was the spelling system of Oleksii Pavlovskyi, the spelling version of "Mermaid of the Dniester" (1837), Kulishivka (P. Kulish's spelling system), Drahomanivka (produced in Kyiv in the 1870s by a group of cultural figures led by linguist P. Zhytetskyi, which included and M. Drahomanov), Zhelekhivka (system of Yevhen Zhelekhovskyi (1886), enshrined in the "Russian Grammar" by Stepan Smal-Stotskyi and Theodore Gartner 1893).


title: Ukrainian language

text: Borys Hrinchenko used some corrections in the fundamental four-volume "Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language" (1907–1909). Most of the spelling rules (practically based on phonetics – "write as you hear") used in Hrinchenko's dictionary are still valid. Hrinchenko's work became an informal spelling and model for Ukrainian writers and publications from 1907 until the creation of the first official Ukrainian spelling in 1918.


title: Ukrainian language

text: On January 17, 1918, the Central Rada of Ukraine issued the "Main Rules of Ukrainian orthography", which, however, did not cover the entire scope of the language. On May 17, 1919, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences approved the "Main Rules of Ukrainian Orthography", which became the basis for all subsequent revisions and amendments.


title: Ukrainian language

text: On July 23, 1925, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR decided to organize a State Commission for the Organization of Ukrainian Spelling (State Spelling Commission). It included more than 20 academics from the USSR, who also expressed a desire to invite representatives of Western Ukraine: Stepan Smal-Stotskyi, Volodymyr Hnatiuk and Vasyl Simovych.


title: Ukrainian language

text: After almost a year of work in April 1926, the "Project of Ukrainian Spelling" was published to acquaint the general public with the new system. After several months of discussion and consideration of the project at the All-Ukrainian Spelling Conference (May 26 – June 6, 1927), the Ukrainian orthography of 1928 was adopted in accordance with the RNC resolution of September 6, 1928. It went down in history as "Kharkiv" or "Skrypnik orthography" – from the place of creation, or from the surname of the People's Commissar of Education Mykola Skrypnyk.


title: Ukrainian language

text: In 1929, Hryhorii Holoskevych published the "Ukrainian Spelling Dictionary" (about 40,000 words), agreed with the full spelling produced by the State Spelling Commission and approved by the People's Commissar for Education (September 6, 1928).


title: Ukrainian language

text: In 1933, a spelling commission headed by Andrii Khvylia branded the Ukrainian orthography of 1928 as "nationalist", immediately stopped publishing any dictionaries, and without any discussion, in a very short time (five months), created a new spelling that unified as never before the Ukrainian and Russian languages. The letter ґ was removed from the alphabet, and Ukrainian scientific terminology was revised and harmonized with Russian-Ukrainian dictionaries (the Institute of Ukrainian Scientific Language was abolished in 1930). This version of the spelling was approved by the resolution of the People's Commissar of Education of the USSR of September 5, 1933.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Some minor changes were made in the spelling of 1946 and 1959 (published the following year). It was connected with the document "The rules of Russian spelling and punctuation", published in 1956. From 1960 until 1990, the 1960 edition was the official standard.


title: Ukrainian language

text: After the beginning of "perestroika", the issue of improving Ukrainian spelling became relevant again: the editing of the spelling code was started by the Orthographic Commission at the LMM of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The project was also discussed in the newly established Ukrainian Language Society. T. Shevchenko (headed by Dmytro Pavlychko). The new version was approved on November 14, 1989, and published in 1990. The main achievements were the restoration of the letter ґ and the accusative case (in Soviet times it was optional and was called the "accusative form").


title: Ukrainian language

text: Today, despite the existence of the official spelling of the Ukrainian language, it is not the only spelling standard in use. Even in Ukraine itself, many publishers and publications use other versions of the spelling, which either tend to "skrypnykivka", or else differ from the official rules of transmission of words of foreign origin.


title: Ukrainian language

text: On May 22, 2019, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine approved a new version of the orthography prepared by the Ukrainian National Commission on Spelling. The new edition brought to life some features of orthography in 1928, which were part of the Ukrainian orthographic tradition. At the same time, the commission was guided by the understanding that the language practice of Ukrainians in the second half of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century has already become part of the Ukrainian orthographic tradition.


title: Ukrainian language

text: "The Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language", in 11 volumes, contains 253,000 entries. Lexical card catalog of the Ukrainian Institute of Language Studies has 6 million cards. As mentioned at the top of the article, Ukrainian is most closely related lexically to Belarusian, and is also closer to Polish than to Russian (for example, можливість, "mozhlyvist", "possibility", and Polish "możliwość", but Russian возможность, "vozmozhnost").


title: Ukrainian language

text: The standard Ukrainian language which is based on the Kyiv–Poltava dialect has a plethora of false friends with the standard Russian language which is based on the Moscow dialect. Many people intentionally do or do not use them, causing their language shift into what is known as Surzhyk where the meaning of some words mimicking Russian could be understood out of context rather than their literal meaning in Ukrainian.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Ukrainian has varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with other Slavic languages and is considered to be most closely related to Belarusian.


title: Ukrainian language

text: In the 19th century, the question of whether Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian languages are dialects of a single language or three separate languages was actively discussed, with the debate affected by linguistic and political factors. The political situation (Ukraine and Belarus being mainly part of the Russian Empire at the time) and the historical existence of the medieval state of Kievan Rus', which occupied large parts of these three nations, led to the creation of the common classification known later as the East Slavic languages. The underlying theory of the grouping is their descent from a common ancestor. In modern times, Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian are usually listed by linguists as separate languages.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Until the 17th and 18th centuries (the time of national and language revival of Ukraine) the Ukrainians were predominantly peasants and petits bourgeois; as a result, the Ukrainian language was mostly vernacular and few earlier literary works from the period can be found. In the cities, Ukrainian coexisted with Church Slavonic—a literary language of religion that evolved from Old Church Slavonic—and later Polish and Russian, both languages which were more often used in formal writing and communication during that time.


title: Ukrainian language

text: Unlike all other Slavic languages, Ukrainian has a synthetic future (also termed inflectional future) tense which developed through the erosion and cliticization of the verb "to have" (or possibly "to take"): "pysat-ymu" (infinitive-future-1st sg.) "I will write". Although the inflectional future (based on the verb 'to have') is characteristic of Romance languages, Ukrainian linguist A. Danylenko argues that Ukrainian differs from Romance in the choice of auxiliary, which should be interpreted as 'to take' and not 'to have.' He states that Late Common Slavic (LCS) had three verbs with the same Proto-Indo-European root :


title: Ukrainian language

text: The three verbs became conflated in East Slavic due to morphological overlap, in particular of *iměti "to have" and *jati "to take" as exemplified in the Middle Ukrainian homonymic imut’ from both iměti (< *jĭměti) and jati (< *jęti). Analogous grammaticalization of the type take ("to take", "to seize") > future is found in Chinese and Hungarian.


title: Puyi

text: Aisin-Gioro Puyi (; 7 February 1906 – 17 October 1967), courtesy name Yaozhi (曜之), was the last emperor of China as the eleventh and final Qing dynasty monarch. He became emperor at the age of two in 1908, but was forced to abdicate on 12 February 1912 during the Xinhai Revolution. His era name as Qing emperor, Xuantong (Hsuan-tung, 宣統), means "proclamation of unity". He was later installed as the Emperor Kangde (康德) of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo during World War II.


title: Puyi

text: He was briefly restored to the throne as Qing emperor by the loyalist General Zhang Xun from 1 July to 12 July 1917. He was first wed to Empress Wanrong in 1922 in an arranged marriage. In 1924, he was expelled from the palace and found refuge in Tianjin, where he began to court both the warlords fighting for hegemony over China and the Japanese who had long desired control of China. In 1932, after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the puppet state of Manchukuo was established by Japan, and he was chosen to become the chief executive of the new state using the era name of "Datong" (Ta-tung).


title: Puyi

text: In 1934, he was declared emperor of Manchukuo with the era name "Kangde" (Kang-te) and reigned over his new empire until the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1945. This third stint as emperor saw him as a puppet of Japan; he signed most edicts the Japanese gave him. During this period, he largely resided in the Salt Tax Palace, where he regularly ordered his servants beaten. His first wife's opium addiction consumed her during these years, and they were generally distant. He took on numerous concubines, as well as male lovers. With the fall of Japan (and thus Manchukuo) in 1945, Puyi fled the capital and was eventually captured by the Soviets; he was extradited to the People's Republic of China in 1950. After his capture, he never saw his first wife again; she died of starvation in a Chinese prison in 1946.