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# 0. Introduction

**On this page**

1. [1. The language in one paragraph](#1-the-language-in-one-paragraph)
2. [2. Family and history in brief](#2-family-and-history-in-brief)
3. [3. Typological profile](#3-typological-profile)
4. [4. The standard and how it moves](#4-the-standard-and-how-it-moves)
5. [5. Variation: the standard and its deltas](#5-variation-the-standard-and-its-deltas)
6. [6. Where the vocabulary comes from](#6-where-the-vocabulary-comes-from)
7. [7. The units of this description](#7-the-units-of-this-description)
8. [8. Notation and conventions](#8-notation-and-conventions)
9. [9. How Mova handles Ukrainian today](#9-how-mova-handles-ukrainian-today)
10. [Sources for this chapter](#sources-for-this-chapter)

This chapter says what Ukrainian is (§1), where it comes from (§2), what kind of language it is (§3), how its standard is made and how it moves (§4), how its variation is described in this manual (§5), where its vocabulary comes from (§6), the units and the notation of the manual (§§7–8), and what Mova does with Ukrainian today (§9).

## 1. The language in one paragraph

Ukrainian (*українська мова*, ukrajins'ka mova) is an East Slavic language, the state language of Ukraine (Constitution of 1996, art. 10; Law No. 2704-VIII of 25 April 2019 "On ensuring the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language"). It is written in a Cyrillic alphabet of 33 letters and the apostrophe ([05](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/05-writing-system/)), with a spelling close to the sound. It is a fusional, strongly inflecting language: nouns have three genders, two numbers and **seven cases including a living vocative** ([11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/)); verbs are organised by **aspect**, with an imperfective and a perfective partner for almost every meaning ([13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/13-verbs/)); stress is **free and mobile** and is not written ([03](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/03-syllable-stress-intonation/)); word order is free and serves information structure. The standard language rests on the speech of the Middle Dnieper (Kyiv and Poltava regions) as written by Kotliarevskyi and Shevchenko in the first half of the 19th century, with a large share of western (Galician) vocabulary and usage added in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century ([08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/)). Its spelling is codified in *Український правопис* (Ukrajins'kyj pravopys, 'Ukrainian orthography'), whose edition in force was approved by the Cabinet of Ministers on 22 May 2019 ([06](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/06-spelling-rules/)).

The 2001 census of Ukraine, the last held, recorded Ukrainian as the native language of 67.5% of the population; the share of people who use it day to day has grown since 2014 and especially since 2022, but no census has measured it since, and this manual gives no figure for it.

## 2. Family and history in brief

| period | dates | language and texts | where in this manual |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Common Slavic → East Slavic | to about the 10th c. | the dialects from which Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian develop | [09](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/) §§1–2 |
| Old East Slavic (Old Rus') | 10th–14th c. | Kyivan Rus'; Church Slavonic as the written language of religion, a vernacular written language in law and letters (*Руська правда*, birch-bark letters, chronicles) | [09](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/) §2 |
| Middle Ukrainian (Ruthenian, *проста мова*) | 14th–18th c. | the chancery language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish–Lithuanian lands; polemical literature; the Peresopnytsia Gospel (1556–1561); the grammars of Zyzanii (1596) and Smotrytskyi (1619); the Cossack chronicles | [09](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/) §3 |
| the new literary language | from 1798 | Kotliarevskyi's *Eneida* (1798), the first book in the vernacular of the Dnieper; Shevchenko's *Kobzar* (1840) | [09](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/) §4 |
| restriction in the Russian Empire | 1863–1905 | the Valuev circular (1863) and the Ems decree (1876) forbid most printing in Ukrainian; the literary language develops in Austrian Galicia and Bukovyna, where Ukrainian is taught and printed (the Zhelekhivskyi spelling, 1886) | [08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §3 |
| a standard for one nation | 1905–1933 | Hrinchenko's dictionary (1907–1909); the grammars of Smal-Stockyj (1913), Simovych (1918, 1919), Syniavskyi (1922); "Ukrainisation" in the 1920s; the all-Ukrainian orthography of 1928 (the "Kharkiv" orthography) | [06](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/06-spelling-rules/) §10, [08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §3 |
| Soviet period | 1933–1989 | the 1933 orthography reform cancels most 1928 rules and brings spelling and terms closer to Russian; the letter *ґ* is removed; a long period of Russification of schools, cities and terminology | [06](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/06-spelling-rules/) §10, [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) §4 |
| independent Ukraine | 1989 → | the 1989 law makes Ukrainian the state language of the Ukrainian SSR; *ґ* restored (1990 orthography); independence (1991); Constitution (1996); Law on the state language and the 2019 orthography (both 2019); the war since 2014 and the full-scale invasion of 2022 shift much of the population, including many Russian speakers, towards Ukrainian | [06](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/06-spelling-rules/), [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) §6 |

The facts of the first three rows are in Simovych 1919 (introduction), Krymskyi 1907 and Vozniak 1911; the 19th-century bans and the history of the orthography are summarised in the preface of the 2019 orthography itself (Pravopys 2019, pp. 2–4). Ukrainian, Belarusian and Rusyn are the closest relatives of each other; Ukrainian shares much of its vocabulary with Polish and Belarusian through the centuries of the Commonwealth ([19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) §2), and its grammar with all East Slavic.

What sets Ukrainian apart from its neighbours inside East Slavic is mostly old and phonological ([09](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/) §2): Old East Slavic *ě* (ѣ) and *o*, *e* in newly closed syllables became *і* (*хліб*, *кінь* : gen. *коня*, *піч* : *печі*); the Old East Slavic *i* and *y* merged as *и* /ɪ/ while a new *і* arose; the fricative *г* [ɦ] took the place of *g*; final voiced consonants are not devoiced; the vocative survived. These sound changes are why one root alternates inside one paradigm (*кіт* 'cat', gen. *кота*), the most visible irregularity of the language ([02](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/02-vowels/) §5, [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/)).

## 3. Typological profile

| feature | Ukrainian | details |
| --- | --- | --- |
| morphological type | fusional, synthetic; one ending carries case, number and gender together | [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/10-word-classes/), [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/) |
| nominal categories | 3 genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) in the singular; 2 numbers (with remnants of the dual after *два, три, чотири*); 7 cases; animacy (decides the accusative) | [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/), [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/12-pronouns-determiners-numerals/) |
| articles | none | [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/12-pronouns-determiners-numerals/) |
| verbal categories | aspect (imperfective/perfective); tense (present, past, future; a remnant pluperfect); mood (indicative, imperative, conditional with *би*); voice through *-ся* and passive participles; person in present and future, gender in the past | [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/13-verbs/), [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/14-irregular-verbs/) |
| future | three forms: *буду писати*, synthetic *писатиму*, perfective *напишу* | [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/13-verbs/) |
| non-finite forms | infinitive *-ти*, participles (passive *-ний/-тий*; active *-учий* limited by the norm), adverbial participles *-учи/-ючи*, *-вши*; impersonal *-но/-то* forms (*зроблено*) | [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/13-verbs/) |
| copula | zero in the present tense (*Він лікар* 'He is a doctor'); *є* for existence and emphasis | chapter 21 |
| subject | can be dropped; the verb ending carries person | chapter 21 |
| word order | free; SVO is the neutral order in written prose; the order follows given → new | chapter 29 |
| stress | free and mobile, unwritten; distinguishes words and forms (*за́мок* 'castle' : *замо́к* 'lock'; *руки́* gen. sg. : *ру́ки* nom. pl.) | [03](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/03-syllable-stress-intonation/) |
| consonants | 32 phonemes; hard–soft pairs for the dentals; no final devoicing; long (geminate) consonants (*життя*, *знання*) | [01](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/01-consonants/) |
| vowels | 6, weakly reduced when unstressed | [02](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/02-vowels/) |
| sandhi in spelling | the euphonic alternations *у/в*, *і/й*, *з/із/зі/зо* are written | [04](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/04-connected-speech/) |

The written language of the treebanks shows this profile in its distributions. In UD Ukrainian 2.18 (counts of 2026-11-06 over the train, dev and test files of both treebanks; the IU treebank is counted, never quoted):

| case of NOUN and PROPN tokens | IU | ParlaMint |
| --- | --- | --- |
| genitive | 36.0% | 39.2% |
| nominative | 24.1% | 21.7% |
| accusative | 19.6% | 19.9% |
| locative | 9.3% | 7.6% |
| instrumental | 8.8% | 5.5% |
| dative | 1.8% | 2.7% |
| vocative | 0.4% | 3.4% |
| nouns counted | 32 894 | 30 897 |

The genitive is the most frequent case in both: it is the case of possession and of nouns depending on nouns, of quantities, of negation and of many prepositions ([11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/)). The vocative is rare in written prose (IU: fiction, news, legal texts, Wikipedia, letters, comments) and frequent in parliamentary speech (ParlaMint), where speakers address each other: *шановні колеги* 'dear colleagues', *пане Голово* 'Mr Chairman'. The share of a case is a fact about a genre, not about the language; the manual names the files for every count so that the reader can tell which.

## 4. The standard and how it moves

### 4.1 Institutions

Ukrainian has no academy that decides usage in the way the Académie française is sometimes thought to. Its norm is described by dictionaries and grammars and codified in three places:

- **the orthography** (*Український правопис*), prepared by the Ukrainian National Commission on Orthography (*Українська національна комісія з питань правопису*, 2015–2018: linguists of the institutes of the National Academy of Sciences and of universities from different regions), approved by the Presidium of the Academy and the Collegium of the Ministry of Education on 24 October 2018 and by the Cabinet of Ministers on 22 May 2019 ([06](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/06-spelling-rules/));
- **the academic dictionaries and grammars** of the National Academy of Sciences: the Institute of the Ukrainian Language (*Інститут української мови НАН України*), the Potebnia Institute of Linguistics (*Інститут мовознавства ім. О. О. Потебні*) and the Ukrainian Language and Information Fund (*Український мовно-інформаційний фонд*), which publishes the 20-volume explanatory dictionary *СУМ-20* and the orthographic dictionaries;
- **the law**: the 2019 Law on the state language sets where Ukrainian must be used, not how it is spelled or inflected.

The schools, the publishers and the editors of the media apply the norm; the open corpora and the large morphological dictionary VESUM (Rysin & Starko, `dict_uk`) record what is written ([10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/10-word-classes/) §2).

### 4.2 The character of the standard: conservative and modern at once

Two things are true of standard Ukrainian at the same time, and the manual keeps both in view.

**It is very conservative.** Forms that other European languages lost centuries ago, or keep only as archaisms, are ordinary everyday Ukrainian, and nobody who uses them feels old-fashioned or bookish:

- the **vocative** is a living case: every noun that can be addressed has it (*мамо*, *друже*, *Тарасе*, *пане професоре*), new words take it, and its absence in address is noticed ([11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/), [09](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/) §6.1);
- the **synthetic future** *ходитиму*, *робитимеш*, which goes back to an infinitive plus a form of *иму* 'I take', is as normal as *буду ходити*; in the Leipzig news sample of 2024 it is about two thirds of the imperfective futures ([13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/13-verbs/), [09](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/) §6);
- the old **dual** survives in the stress and form of nouns after *два, три, чотири* (*дві руки́*, not *ру́ки*; *два брати́*) ([12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/12-pronouns-determiners-numerals/));
- **short adjectives** (*повен*, *винен*, *зелен* in songs), the **pluperfect** (*я був пішов*), the first-person plural imperative *ходім(о)*, and the uncontracted adjective forms of folk song (*зеленая*, *молодая*) are understood by everyone and used where they fit ([15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/15-adjectives-adverbs/), [09](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/));
- many words of the old written language are neutral today: *гетьман*, *зрада*, *воля*, *пан*, *господар*, *оселя*.

**It is very modern.** The standard follows usage, and quickly. The orthography itself says so. Its preface, written by the commission, holds that "the language of the people is made by its history: language changes, and the orthography must reflect above all its present state" (*мову народу творить його історія: мова змінюється, і правопис має відображати насамперед її сучасний стан*), that the language practice of the second half of the 20th and the early 21st century "has already become part of the Ukrainian orthographic tradition", and that "the co-authors of the Ukrainian orthography are also the wide circle of educated Ukrainians whose written practice makes this or that spelling customary" (*співтворцями Українського правопису є також широке коло освічених українців, чия писемна практика узвичаює те чи те написання*) (Pravopys 2019, preface, p. 4). The academic institutions work in the same spirit: the norm is described from usage and updated when usage has settled, and the dictionaries catch up within years, not over centuries as in French or Greek.

The measured results of the 2019 code show both halves at work. In the Leipzig news samples (1 million sentences each, CC BY; counts of 2026-11-06, details in [06](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/06-spelling-rules/) §§6, 9, 12):

| 2019 change | news 2018 | news 2024 | reading |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *проєкт* for *проект* | 0.03% | 82.7% | a rule that matched what writers wanted: adopted within five years |
| *пів* written apart (*пів року*) | 1.2% | 24.1% | adopted slowly; *півроку* still more common |
| feminine titles *міністерка*, *президентка* | 11, 4 tokens | 232, 263 tokens | usage ran ahead and the 2019 code confirmed it ([17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/17-derivation-suffixes/)) |
| the 1928-style variants *етер*, *катедра*, *Атени*, genitive *-ости* | — | under 1% to 10% | allowed as variants, hardly taken up |
| *Лондону* (now the main form) for *Лондона* | 13 : 268 | 14 : 170 | the code is ahead of usage here, and usage has not followed |

So a variant that the code allows but writers do not want stays marginal, and a form that writers want is codified. This manual therefore describes the norm **descriptively**: it says what people say and write, how the 2019 orthography codified that usage, which variants it allows, and where usage is ahead of the codified norm (or behind it). Where it is, the chapter says so with a count.

### 4.3 What "standard" means here

The manual describes **the literary standard** (*літературна мова*) in its written and spoken forms, and alongside it the **permitted colloquial** usage of educated speakers: forms of Ukrainian origin that are not codified for writing but are not mistakes either (*шо* for *що*, *нема* beside *немає*, *тре'* for *треба*, *ото*, the dropped *є*). The two differ less than in many languages, and the colloquial forms often come from the dialects, so that the distance between "standard" and "colloquial" is mostly one of register ([19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) §7).

## 5. Variation: the standard and its deltas

The varieties of Ukrainian are described in this manual as **deltas over the standard**: for each variety, which grammar rules change, which words are added or replaced, and what shifts in pronunciation and spelling. A full parallel grammar is given only for the standard. The varieties are:

| variety | what it is | chapter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| regional dialects | three groups: northern (Polissian), south-western (Volhynian–Podolian, Galician–Bukovynian, the Carpathian dialects: Hutsul, Boyko, Lemko, Transcarpathian), south-eastern (Middle Dnieper, Slobozhan, Steppe) | [08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §§1–2 |
| the western (Galician) and the Dnieper norms | two historical centres of the standard; their traces are variants inside today's standard (*філіжанка* : *чашка*, *горнятко*) | [08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §3 |
| the diaspora | Canada, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Australia; Western Europe after 2022; older Ukrainian norms and English or Portuguese contact | [08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §4 |
| surzhyk | a contact variety of Ukrainian and Russian, with its own regularities in lexicon, morphology and sound; a variety in its own right, distinct from the literary standard and from permitted colloquial speech, not a list of errors | [08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §5, chapter 37 |
| older Ukrainian | Middle Ukrainian, the 19th-century literary language, the old forms that live on | [09](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/) |
| registers and styles | official, scientific, press, colloquial, slang, church; **song** as a register of its own, with an alternative grammar (word order driven by rhyme and metre, dropped words, dialect and surzhyk forms used for effect, uncontracted adjectives) | [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) §7, [08](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) §6, chapter 37 |

Ukraine has one standard and no second national centre: there is no "national variety" of Ukrainian in the sense that there are American and British English. Chapter 8 keeps the English manual's file name, *national-varieties*, for the place of these deltas.

## 6. Where the vocabulary comes from

The core of the vocabulary is inherited from Common Slavic and Old East Slavic. On it lie, in order of age: a learned Church Slavonic layer (*благо*, *священний*, *страждання*); Turkic words of the steppe (*козак*, *отаман*, *чумак*, *кавун*, *майдан*); a deep Polish layer, often of German, Latin or Czech origin, from the 14th–18th centuries (*цікавий*, *мусити*, *рахунок*, *ґанок*, *шлюб*, *вада*); German loans, many through Polish (*дах*, *шухляда*, *ярмарок*); a large Russian layer of the 18th–20th centuries, much of it in administration, science and technology; and an English layer that has grown since the 1990s and fastest since the 2010s (*гаджет*, *донат*, *дедлайн*, *стрім*). Ukrainian lexicography and editing have a long purist tradition that judges loans, especially Russian ones; the manual describes loans by **measured usage**, with counts from the open corpora, and says what the purist judgement is without taking it as the description ([19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/19-lexicon-mwe-register/)).

## 7. The units of this description

The manual describes the language in the units of traditional Ukrainian grammar, and names each unit also in the terms of Universal Dependencies (UD) and of VESUM, because those are the two tag sets in the data Mova reads:

| traditional term | Ukrainian | UD | VESUM |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| noun | іменник | NOUN, PROPN | `noun` |
| adjective | прикметник | ADJ (and DET for pronominal adjectives) | `adj` |
| numeral | числівник | NUM | `numr` |
| pronoun | займенник | PRON, DET | `noun:…:pron:…`, `adj:…:pron:…` |
| verb | дієслово | VERB, AUX | `verb` |
| adverb | прислівник | ADV | `adv` |
| adverbial participle | дієприслівник | VERB with `VerbForm=Conv` | `advp` |
| preposition | прийменник | ADP | `prep` |
| conjunction | сполучник | CCONJ, SCONJ | `conj` |
| particle | частка | PART | `part` |
| interjection | вигук | INTJ | `intj` |
| case | відмінок | `Case=Nom Gen Dat Acc Ins Loc Voc` | `v_naz v_rod v_dav v_zna v_oru v_mis v_kly` |

[10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/10-word-classes/) has the full mapping and the words that belong to several classes; the names of the cases are in [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/) §4.

## 8. Notation and conventions

- **Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic.** On first use a word is followed by its transliteration in italics and a gloss in single quotes: *хата* (xata) 'house'. The transliteration is the scholarly one of Slavic linguistics ([05](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/05-writing-system/) §9.3): *h* for г, *g* for ґ, *y* for и, *i* for і, *ji* for ї, *j* for й, *je ju ja* for є ю я, *ž š č šč x c* for ж ш ч щ х ц, and *'* for the soft sign and the apostrophe. Names of authors and works in the source lists follow the same scheme or the spelling the work itself uses (*Smal-Stockyj*, as in his German grammar).
- **Stress** is marked with an acute accent where it matters (*ру́ки* : *руки́*). Ukrainian does not write it, and Mova strips it when it reads a word (`norm` in `kg/src/morph.rs`).
- **Sounds** are in the IPA, phonemes between slashes (/xɑtɑ/) and pronunciations in square brackets ([ˈxɑtɑ]). [01](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/01-consonants/) and [02](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/02-vowels/) give the inventory.
- **Examples** are constructed for this manual unless they carry a source. Examples from UD Ukrainian-ParlaMint (CC BY-SA 4.0) carry their `sent_id` (`ParlaMint-UA_2003-10-14-m0.u130.p1.lang1.s2`) and are quoted sparingly. UD Ukrainian-IU, Brown-UK and VESUM are under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: the manual counts them and quotes none of their sentences. The Leipzig Corpora Collection samples (*ukr_news_2024*, *ukr_newscrawl_2018*, *ukr_wikipedia_2021*; CC BY, Goldhahn, Eckart & Quasthoff 2012) are counted; their sentences are not quoted.
- **Counts** were made on **2026-11-06** over the files named next to them. "IU" and "ParlaMint" mean the train, dev and test files of UD 2.18 together unless a chapter says otherwise.
- **Sources** are cited briefly in the text (*Simovych 1919 §112*, *Pravopys 2019 §74*, *Hentschel 2023*) and listed with licences and library paths in [Sources: chapters 00–19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/sources-00-19/); each chapter also ends with its own short list.
- **"How Mova handles it"** is the last section of every chapter and names real files. Where Mova does nothing, it says so.

## 9. How Mova handles Ukrainian today

Mova's Ukrainian is small, and each chapter says where it stops. The state on 2026-11-06:

**1. The English parser on Ukrainian treebanks.** Mova's dependency parser (`en`) can be trained on a Ukrainian treebank after `en xpos-fill` has mapped the UPOS and FEATS columns to the Penn tag set it knows (`xpos_fill` and `xpos_of` in `en/src/main.rs`). The Penn tags keep number and a few verb forms; case, gender, animacy and aspect are lost in the tag. Measured with the `en` binary of 2026-10-22 on UD 2.18, training on train and testing on dev, two runs with identical scores:

| treebank | dev tokens | LAS, our tags | UAS, our tags | LAS, gold tags | UAS, gold tags | tagger accuracy (unknown words) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| UD Ukrainian-IU | 12 606 | 73.43 | 79.69 | 78.17 | 83.02 | 92.96% (83.74%) |
| UD Ukrainian-ParlaMint | 10 842 | 79.28 | 83.48 | 81.34 | 85.01 | 95.97% (84.56%) |

For comparison, the same parser gives LAS 87.00 on French GSD ([What every language gets](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/PACKAGE/)). The gap is what one expects of a tag set without case in a language whose syntax rests on case: the relations `obj`, `iobj`, `obl` and `nmod` are told apart in Ukrainian mostly by the case ending, and the tagger never sees it. On IU, 23.6% of the dev tokens are unknown to the tagger, against 12.9% on ParlaMint: an inflecting language multiplies word forms ([11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/)). The open neural parsers for Ukrainian (Stanza, UDPipe 2, COMBO, Trankit) are being installed and measured as witnesses under uk; their numbers are not yet in [Open parsers: witnesses and tests](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/repo-docs/parsers/).

**2. The tokenizer.** `en tok-eval`, learning its dictionary from the train file and evaluating on dev (2026-11-06, two identical runs): IU 673 sentences, 92.6% of them tokenized exactly as in the treebank, token F1 99.05; ParlaMint 739 sentences, 99.6% exact, F1 99.95. The apostrophe inside a word (*в'їзд*, *м'ясо*) is kept as part of the word, as UD Ukrainian requires; the misses are hyphenated words that the dictionary learned to split, initials and numbers such as *1-1* ([07](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/07-punctuation-typography/) §11).

**3. The `kg` crate: Mova's own Ukrainian.** `kg` holds the only Ukrainian-specific code in Mova (`kg/src/uk.rs`, `kg/src/morph.rs`, `kg/src/gram.rs`, `kg/src/textgen.rs`; [kg — the Mova knowledge graph](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/)):

- a morphological analyser and synthesizer over VESUM (`dict_corp_vis.txt.bz2`): a word form gives its lemmas and grammars, a lemma and a grammar give the form back;
- a 4-byte grammar code (`Gram`) with part of speech, the seven cases (`v_naz` … `v_kly`), number, three genders, person, tense or form, aspect, animacy and degree, and flags for pronoun, proper name, negation and an implicit member;
- a tokenizer that keeps hyphens and the apostrophes *'*, *’*, *ʼ* inside words, and a normaliser that lowercases, unifies the apostrophes and removes stress marks and invisible characters (`tokenize`, `norm`, `invisible`);
- a conservative parser from a simple sentence to a fact (predicate, subject, objects by case, adverbials with preposition and case, attributes): sentences of up to eight words without commas, conjunctions or digits; an ambiguity it cannot resolve is a rejection with a reason, never a guess; verb and preposition government comes from the VESUM `rv_*` tags;
- a deterministic generator from fact back to sentence (chunk order from a Markov chain over member classes, forms from VESUM synthesis) with a round-trip gate.

It is evaluated by hand: on the development sample `kg/examples/gold-v1.tsv` (30 Tatoeba sentences, verdicts of 2026-09-24) 19 parses are right, 2 half right and 9 wrong; `kg/examples/heldout-v2.tsv` holds a second sample graded before any fix based on it. VESUM is CC BY-NC-SA, so `kg` is a research and test path: what is built from it cannot go into a release.

**4. Wiktionary.** The raw Ukrainian Wiktionary dump of 2026-09-01 and the Ukrainian sections of the English Wiktionary are held (wiktionary); `tools/wikt-count` reads them in its `uk` mode ([Data, libraries and licences](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/repo-docs/data/)). Wiktionary is CC BY-SA: for learning and tests only. Chapter 3 uses its stress marks for counts.

**5. What Mova does not have.** No Ukrainian in the `en` lexicon, lemmatiser or inflector; no phonology, stress model or grapheme-to-phoneme module; no transliteration in the public code; no spelling normaliser between the 1993 and 2019 norms; no labels for dialect, register or surzhyk (VESUM has tags `arch`, `slang`, `bad`, `alt`, `up19`, `up92`, and `kg` drops them when it reads the dictionary); no model of a variety as a delta over the standard; no Ukrainian pragmatics, frames or world. The chapters say, point by point, what the nearest piece of Mova does and what would be needed.

## Sources for this chapter

- *Український правопис* (2019), approved by Cabinet of Ministers resolution No. 437 of 22 May 2019; preface pp. 2–5. Official document, not protected by copyright. Library `books/u/uk/ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019` (`uk-gram-pravopys-2019`); [archive.org/details/6032727-Ukr-Pravopys-2019](https://archive.org/details/6032727-Ukr-Pravopys-2019)
- Simovych, Vasyl'. 1919. *Hramatyka ukrajins'koji movy dlja samonavčannja ta v dopomohu škil'nij nauci.* Kyiv–Leipzig: Ukrajins'ka nakladnja. Public domain. Library `books/s/si/simovych-1919-hramatyka-ukrainskoi-movy-dlia` (`uk-gram-simovych-1919`).
- Smal-Stockyj, Stephan. 1913. *Ruthenische Grammatik.* Berlin–Leipzig: Göschen. Public domain. Library `books/s/st/stockyj-1913-ruthenische-grammatik` (`uk-gram-smal-stockyj-1913`); [archive.org/details/ruthenischegramm00smaluoft](https://archive.org/details/ruthenischegramm00smaluoft)
- Krymskyi, Ahatanhel. 1907–1908. *Ukrainskaja grammatika dlja učenikov vysšich klassov gimnazij i seminarij Pridneprov'ja.* Moscow. Public domain. Library `books/k/kr/krymskyi-1907-ukraynskaia-hrammatyka-dlia-uchenykov` (`uk-gram-krymskyi-1907`).
- Vozniak, Mykhailo. 1911. *Hramatyka Lavrentija Zyzanija z 1596 r.* Public domain. Library `books/v/vo/vozniak-1911-hramatyka-lavrentiia-zyzaniia-z` (`uk-gram-vozniak-1911-zyzanii`).
- Shvedova, Maria, Arsenii Lukashevskyi & Andriy Rysin. 2025. Developing a Universal Dependencies treebank for Ukrainian parliamentary speech. CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology) (`shvedova-2025-developing-universal-dependencies-treebank-ukrainian`).
- Goldhahn, Dirk, Thomas Eckart & Uwe Quasthoff. 2012. Building large monolingual dictionaries at the Leipzig Corpora Collection. LREC 2012. (The *ukr_news_2018/2024* and *ukr_wikipedia_2021* samples, CC BY.)
- de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine, Christopher Manning, Joakim Nivre & Daniel Zeman. 2021. Universal Dependencies. *Computational Linguistics* 47(2). CC BY 4.0 (`demarneffe-2021`).
- Data: UD Ukrainian-IU 2.18 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, counts only) and UD Ukrainian-ParlaMint 2.18 (CC BY-SA 4.0), ud-treebanks-v2.18; VESUM / `dict_uk` 6.8.6 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, counts only); counts of 2026-11-06.
- Mova: `en/src/main.rs` (`xpos_fill`, `xpos_of`, `tok_eval`, `parse_eval`), `kg/src/uk.rs`, `kg/src/morph.rs`, `kg/src/gram.rs`, `kg/src/textgen.rs`, [kg — the Mova knowledge graph](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/), `kg/examples/`; [What every language gets](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/PACKAGE/).
- [next → 1. Consonants](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/01-consonants/)
- [↑ back to Ukrainian: a reference manual for Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/)