While there are similarities in the grammar, Ukrainian tends to closer to that of Russian than Polish.
Is Ukrainian closer to Russian or Polish? Grammatically and morphologically Ukrainian is closer to Russian: they both have common East Slavic features. However, lexically Ukrainian is closer to Polish and Slovak. Many people say that this is because of big amount of borrowed West Slavic words.
It's a Slavic language, which means it's related to languages such as Russian, Czech, and Polish. This is a huge language family with lots of linguistic diversity, so modern Ukrainian shares some commonalities with its closest relatives, Russian and Belorussian, and fewer with its more distant cousins (like Czech).
After Belarusian, Ukrainian is also closer to Slovak, Polish, and Czech than to Russian – 38% of Ukrainian vocabulary is different from Russian. If we compare it with other European languages, the difference is like between Spanish and Italian (33% of different vocabulary) or French and Portuguese (39%).
Once you learn Ukrainian, you can understand Polish, Czech, Belarusian, or other Slavic languages because they are quite similar. Coming from the same family of languages, they share common sounds and roots of words.
Among the major languages, it is most closely related to Slovak and Czech but differs in terms of pronunciation and general grammar.
The Polish minority in Ukraine officially numbers about 144,130 (according to the 2001 census), of whom 21,094 (14.6%) speak Polish as their first language. The history of Polish settlement in current territory of Ukraine dates back to 1030–31.
Poland and Russia share a border and a complicated history. Since Polish and Russian are both Slavic languages, they're fairly closely related. So, if your goal is to learn a popular Slavic language, it really comes down to these two.
In fact, according to the FSI (Foreign Service Institute) of the US government, an English speaker would need about 1100 class hours or 44 weeks of practice to become fluent in Ukrainian. This makes Ukrainian as hard to learn as Polish, Icelandic or Finnish.
Answer and Explanation: In the 15th and 16th centuries, most of modern Ukraine was a part of Poland. In the 17th century, Poland and Russia struggled for control of western Ukraine. In the 18th century, Poland was partitioned and the territory was transferred to Russia.
According to the latest survey, as of March 2022, 78% of Ukrainians considered the Ukrainian language their native, while 20% named Russian. Around 30% of people speak both Russian and Ukrainian at home — they can understand both languages and use them interchangeably also in different spheres of life.
Ukrainian actually has a higher lexical similarity with other Slavic languages — it has 84% similarity with Belarusian, 70% with Polish, and 66% with Slovak.
Significant numbers of people in the country speak Polish, Yiddish, Rusyn, Belarusian, Romanian or Moldovan, Bulgarian, Crimean Turkish, or Hungarian. Russian is the most important minority language.
Language Family, Regions, and Speakers
Both German and Polish are Indo-European languages. German belongs to the subfamily of the Germanic languages (together with English and the Scandinavian languages) while Polish is a Slavic language, which means it is similar to Czech and Russian.
Both Russian and Polish are Slavic languages but despite this they only have roughly 38% lexical overlap – compare this with 56% for English and German, 82% for Spanish and Italian, or 86% for Polish and Slovak.
Czech and Polish are often considered the most difficult Slavic languages to learn for English speakers. That's mainly due to their complex grammatical structure and difficult pronunciation.
Which Slavic language is the best to learn? If you're looking to communicate with the most amount of people or have a love for literature, Russian is the best Slavic to learn. If you're looking for the easiest Slavic language to learn, we would suggest Bulgarian with the lack of grammatical cases.
The East Slavic Languages
Of these, Russian is by far the most widely used. It is the native language of Russia and the first language for more than 160 million speakers. It was widely used throughout the Soviet Union and is still spoken in several Eastern European countries.
Poles, or Polish people, are a West Slavic ethnic group and nation who share a common history, culture, the Polish language and are identified with the country of Poland in Central Europe.
Ukrainian and Belarusian are the closest languages, as together with Russian they form the East Slavic group of languages. These three languages have an 86% lexical similarity; that is, they share 86% of the same words.
Polish is a Western Slavic language spoken by approximately 38 million people within Poland. Polish speakers can also be found throughout the globe, especially in hubs of the Polish diaspora such as Chicago, London and New York. Polish uses a Latin-based alphabet with diacritics on certain consonants and vowels.
It forms the second largest ethnic minority in the country after the Russians, at around 3.1% of the total population. An estimated 205,200 Belarusian Poles live in large agglomerations and 82,493 in smaller settlements, with the number of women exceeding the number of men by 33,905.