Ukrainians - Orientation

Identification. Ukrainians are the second-largest Slavic group in the world and they form the sixth-largest nation in Europe. They comprise the majority of the population of the Republic of Ukraine, which declared its independence on 24 August 1991. According to the census of 1989, Ukrainians constitute 37.4 million or 72.7 percent of the total population of Ukraine, estimated at 51.7 million people. In addition, there were 6.8 million Ukrainians living in the former republics of the Soviet Union and at least 2 million living in the countries of Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Ukraine is a polyethnic republic. Over a quarter of its population is not Ukrainian (22 percent are Russians, 0.9 percent Jews, 0.8 percent Belarussians). These groups have played an important role in the economic, political, and cultural development of the Ukrainian nation. Ethnic influences are especially pronounced in multicultural regions (Transcarpathia, Odessa region, Donbass, and the Crimea). Development has occurred in conjunction with the ethnic consolidation of the Ukrainian people, the growth of their national self-awareness, an increase in the social mobility of the population, and the formation of common features of its culture and life-style. The Ukrainian language is used more and more in everyday speech.

A number of state laws have stimulated these changes, in particular the Law on Language, which not only establishes Ukrainian as the national language but creates conditions for the preservation of the languages of all the ethnic minorities (opening of national schools, chairs in universities, radio, optional language instruction), freedom of religion, opening of national communal centers, and so on.

Location. Ukraine is in the southwest of the eastern European plain. It is famous for its beauty and picturesque scenery; its lands, mostly plains, are bounded by the Carpathian and the Crimean mountains on the west and south. The Black and Azov seas wash its southern borders. Its soil is extremely fertile, especially the chernozems. Ukraine is rich in natural resources: there are large reserves of coal (in the Donetsk region) and abundant deposits of iron ore and manganese. Within the Ukrainian "Cristalline Shield" are titanium, nickel, chromium, mercury, aluminum, uranium, chemical resources, and building materials ranging from granite and marble to limestone and fire clay. There are relatively large deposits of oil and natural gas in the Precarpathian and other regions. The Dnieper, Dniester, and the Danube rivers flow through Ukraine into the Black Sea. Neighboring seas that do not freeze have permitted the construction of trading routes; these routes were known to the Vikings, Greeks, Romans, and other peoples of Europe and Asia. During the last decades, however, human activities have harmed Ukrainian lands, causing the impoverishment of the environment, disruption of the ecological balance and, above all, the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power station.

Demography. Presently Ukrainians are dispersed evenly over the territory of the republic, which, with the exception of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and some industrial regions of the southeast, is noted for the high density of its population (85.6 people per square kilometer). In most regions Ukrainians constitute more than 70 percent of the urban population. The percentage of Ukrainians is even higher in rural areas: in almost all regions, it is over 90 percent.

The growth of cities was accompanied by a decrease in the rural population, especially since the second half of the 1920s. While the urban population of the Ukraine multiplied nearly sevenfold between 1920 and 1991, the rural population dropped from 21.3 million to 16.9 million people (i.e., from 80.7 to 32.7 percent of the population).

These changes were caused by migration and the reorganization of rural villages into urban ones or the merger of rural villages with cities. During the 1970s alone, the urban population of the Ukraine rose by 4.8 million people (2 million as result of natural growth in cities and 2.8 million as a result of reorganizing rural villages into urban ones and migration to cities).

The decrease in natural growth and the demographic losses of the 1930s had a negative impact on the size of the rural population of the Ukraine. At the end of the nineteenth century the birthrate in the Ukraine was one of the highest in Europe—7.5 children per woman; in 1989 it was only 1.9 child, which was the lowest of all the republics of the Soviet Union. The drop in the birthrate, which began in the 1920s, is still taking place. Since 1979, moreover, depopulation has also occurred in the rural areas, and thus now affects the entire republic.

Linguistic Affiliation. The Ukrainian language belongs to the East Slavic Branch of the Slavic Stock of the Indo-European Language Family. In the early period of the formation of the Ukrainian nation, the traditions of the literary language of Kievan Rus' were dominant. Alongside the language that grew from local dialects, there was a literary language common to the East Slavs and close to the modern language of South Slavs. Later, when a large portion of Ukrainian and Belarussian lands were part of the Lithuanian principality, a common Ukrainian-Belarussian language began to emerge based on Old Russian. It was used on many written monuments in both nations and played an important part in different spheres of their public life.

In 1989, 40 million people (78 percent of the population) in the Ukraine spoke Ukrainian fluently, 1.5 million more than in 1979. Thirty-two million Ukrainians consider their national language their mother tongue. Tens of thousands of Russians and Poles and a large number of Czechs, Slovaks, Moldavians, and Romanians who live in Ukraine also speak Ukrainian as their primary language. More than 4 million people consider Ukrainian their second language and speak it fluently. In mixed ethnic regions, multilingualism is common. Its extent is determined by the location of the ethnic groups and the duration of ethnocultural contacts. Such factors have also been taken into consideration during the formulation of the Law on Language and its implementation.

In the sixteenth through seventeenth centuries there were two literary languages in the Ukraine: Slavic Russian, resulting from the interaction of Old Church Slavonic and the Old Russian literary language (used mostly in church literature) and the so-called common one based on the Old Russian literary language, which has absorbed much from the Ukrainian language.

The Ukrainian language acquired specific Ukrainian features and retained an internal dialectical division (middle Dnieper, Polessk, Podolsk, Transcarpathian, etc.). These dialects are conventionally classified into three groups: northern, southwestern, and southeastern. The Middle-Pridnieper (Poltava-Kiev) dialects of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formed the basis of the modern Ukrainian literary language, which gradually absorbed elements of other regional Ukrainian dialects.