The Main Grammatical Differences Between Ukrainian and English

Letters and sounds

While English utilizes the Latin alphabet with 26 letters, the Ukrainian language employs the Cyrillic alphabet with 33 characters. Additionally, English consonants have a strong pronunciation before vowels, unlike Ukrainian consonants, which are classified as hard and soft.

Voiced consonants are always voiced at the end of the word, and before deaf consonants, the word’s meaning often changes if they are unvoiced. For example: “face” [feɪs] (noun) refers to the front part of the head; “phase” [feɪz] (noun) refers to a stage of a process. At the end of a word, Ukrainian transforms voiced consonants into voiceless sounds. For example: “віз” (cart) becomes [vis], Бог (God) – [boh].

English pronunciation doesn’t follow the rules used to spell the words. There is even a joke on that phenomenon: “Write Manchester, read Liverpool.” The gap between a word’s spelling and its pronunciation is quite significant. Since the sound system in English has undergone substantial changes for a long time, the spelling has not changed. Furthermore, 26 English alphabet letters produce 44 unique sounds. In the Ukrainian language, the sound system has 38 sounds: 6 vowels and 32 consonants.

Ukrainian is one of the harmonious languages. It distinguishes its soft pronunciation and vowel harmony. Ukrainian has a similarity with Italian and French in relation to tunefulness.

Articles

The articles play a crucial role in the English language, providing clarity to some particular situations. Articles help indicate that a noun refers to something specific or more general things. However, definite and indefinite articles do not exist in Ukrainian. Instead, context is an important part of this language because it can show that something is specific or general.

For instance:

• In the English language, we say: “a book,” “the book.”
• In Ukrainian, we say simply: “книга” (knyha). The context or usage of additional words will make it clear whether it means “a specific book” or just “any book.”

Example:

Я бачу книгу – I see a book (general, any book)

Я бачу книгу, яку ти читав – I see the book that you were reading (specific).

We use demonstrative pronouns such as “цей” (meaning “this”) or “той” (meaning “that”)  to specify things more clearly, similarly to the usage of definite articles.

For instance:

Книга – a book, the book.

Ця книга – this book.

Та книга – that book.

Nouns

The system of noun endings has a huge difference in both languages. Ukrainian has a distinctive grammatical feature in 6 cases. Nouns change their endings according to their role in the sentence (subject, object, possession, etc.) This is a common feature in many Slavic languages.

For example:

• Nominative: книга (the book);
• Genitive: книги (of the book);
• Dative: книзі (to/for the book);
• Accusative: книгу (the book);
• Instrumental: книгою (with the book);
• Locative: (у) книзі (in) the book.

In contrast, English doesn’t have these complex case endings. Whereas it mainly uses prepositions (“of,” “to,” “with”) to indicate the grammatical role of a noun in a sentence. There is only one possessive case (for example, “John’s book”).

English relies more on word order and prepositions to convey grammatical relationships in place of morphological case endings on the nouns themselves.

Gender

Without a doubt, Ukrainian has another distinctive feature, which is grammatical gender, which affects the form of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Languages such as Spanish and French tend to have a grammatical gender: masculine and feminine. In English, this grammar doesn’t exist at all. Ukrainian keeps three classic genders: masculine, feminine, and neutral.

For instance:

Кіт – a male cat (masculine);

Машина – a car (feminine);

Місто – a city (neutral).

Formation of Ukrainian gender grammar:

• Masculine: Typically, a consonant termination: (браТ (brother), водіЙ (driver), суД (court), вплиВ (influence)).
• Feminine: Typically -а,-я: (сестрА (sister), націЯ (nation), лікарнЯ (hospital)).
• Neuter: Typically -о,-е or a double consonant +я: (містО (town, city), полЕ (field), місцЕ (place), століттЯ (century)).

However, English does have gender distinction in personal pronouns:

• He, him, his (masculine);
• She, her, hers (feminine);
• They, them, their (gender-neutral singular or plural);
• It, its (used for objects, animals, or things without gender).

Some nouns in English also reflect gender, but they are rare or becoming outdated:

actor/actress (male/female);

waiter/waitress (male/female).

In contrast to Ukrainian, English mostly uses neutral forms, except in cases involving people or animals where gender is relevant.

The word order

The word order is flexible in Ukrainian because of the case system. It affects the meaning of the sentences more than word order.

Example: “Я бачу Марію” (I see Maria) could also be written as “Марію бачу я” that has changed a bit the meaning of the sentence.

English has a relatively fixed order of words in the sentences (SUBJECT, VERB, OBJECT).

For example, “I see Maria” cannot be changed to “Maria, I see.”

The conjugation of verbs

The conjugation of verbs is completely different in both languages. Verbs in English inflect minimally. The main changes are an addition of -S for a third-person singular, -ED for past tense, and the use of auxiliary verbs, negative forms, and tenses. Ukrainian verbs have extensive conjugation patterns that are based on person, number, tense, and gender. There are perfective and imperfective aspects in Ukrainian that change the form of verbs.

Conclusion

These differences highlight that English is less inflected and relies heavily on word order and auxiliary verbs, whereas Ukrainian is highly inflected, having more complex grammar that plays a major role in sentence construction.