Language code: uk

Technical information about ISO 639 language code uk

The table below provides technical details for the Ukrainian language, designated by the uk code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

uk

Name

Official

Ukrainian

Native

Українська

Family
Slavic
Scripts
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Plural rules

More info

Language varieties
Northern UkrainianSouth-Western UkrainianSouth-Eastern Ukrainian
Related languages
BelarusianRussianRusyn
Key facts
The Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters, including unique characters Ґ, Є, І, ЇUkrainian shares over 80 % lexical similarity with Belarusian, the highest among Slavic languagesModern standard Ukrainian was codified in the late 19th century by writers such as Panteleimon Kulish and Ivan Nechuy-LevytskyThe language preserves two distinct phonemic 'i' vowels (і vs и), which merged in other East Slavic languagesUkrainian extensively uses diminutive suffixes, allowing affectionate or nuanced forms of most nouns
Sample phrase

Привіт, як ти?

Character encodings

Windows 1251, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Ukrainian belongs to the Indo-European language family, more specifically to the Slavic subgroup. It is the official language of Ukraine, and it is also used by Ukrainian minority communities in Belarus, Russia, and Moldova. It is written using the Cyrillic script (Ukrainian alphabet). It is estimated that there are between 35 and 40 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

627K

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Ukrainian speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

uk-UA Ukrainian (Ukraine)

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