The international delegation, headed by Ana Lucía Bueno, ICRC Public Health Coordinator, and Sujit Panda, Head of the Physical Rehabilitation…
Every year, on February 21, the world celebrates International Mother Language Day.
It was proclaimed at the 30th session of the UNESCO General Conference on November 17, 1999, in Paris to preserve the world’s linguistic diversity and promote respectful attitudes toward all languages, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reminds.
On February 21, 1952, in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), Pakistani authorities brutally suppressed a demonstration of people protesting the government’s ban on the use of their native Bengali language.
Since then, Bangladesh has commemorated the Day of Martyrs for the Mother Tongue every year.
At the proposal of this country, UNESCO declared February 21 International Mother Language Day.
In Ukraine, the holiday has existed since 2002, when, with the aim of strengthening the state-building role of the Ukrainian language and promoting the free development and use of other languages of Ukraine’s national minorities, the President of Ukraine issued Directive No. 34/2002-rp “On Celebrating International Mother Language Day” on February 14, 2002.
According to Article 10 of the Constitution of Ukraine, the state language of Ukraine is Ukrainian.
At the same time, there are languages in Ukraine at risk of extinction — in particular, two Romani dialects, Krymchak, Urum, and the Halych dialect of the Karaim language.
Interesting facts:
- Modern Ukrainian contains over 256,000 words.
- Unlike other East Slavic languages, Ukrainian has 7 grammatical cases, including the vocative.
- Ukrainian has three dialect groups: Northern, South-Eastern, and South-Western. These groups contain 15 dialects, and within them — many local subdialects. Practically every village has its own.
- In vocabulary, the closest languages to Ukrainian are Belarusian and Polish.
- Russian literary language shares only 8 out of 40 phonological features with Ukrainian. In 32 features out of 40, Ukrainian differs from Russian; among them, 8 are unique and exist only in Ukrainian.
- The least common initial letter in Ukrainian is “Ф”. Only three native Ukrainian words begin with it (Fedyr, fe, forkáty); all others are borrowings.
- The largest number of words in the Ukrainian language begins with the letter “П”.
Ukrainian is rich in synonyms.
The Dictionary of Synonyms of the Ukrainian Language contains more than 17,000 synonymic groups.
The word with the most synonyms is “beat” — it has 45.
The word “zavirjúkha” (“snowstorm”) has 40 synonyms.
One of the distinctive features of Ukrainian is the abundance of diminutive forms: kytsunia, kozeniatko, vorozhenky, istonky, spatonky, nedalechko, teperechky.
Another interesting fact: Ukrainian has the consonant phonemes “dz” and “dzh”, which in writing are rendered as digraphs representing single phonemes.
Ukrainian also features words with a double prefix po-: popobachyty, popoisty, popoblukaty.
The system of grammatical cases in Ukrainian is unique due to the presence of the vocative case. Other East Slavic languages do not have it.
Taras Shevchenko’s “Zapovit” (“Testament”) has been translated into more than 150 languages, which is a record among Ukrainian works.
