Ukrainian

Ukrainian is an East Slavic language with around forty million speakers and one of the most melodic reputations in Europe — it is built on open vowels and soft consonants, and it has survived a long history of being banned outright, most notably by the Ems Ukaz of 1876. Since 2022 it has also become one of the fastest-growing languages on learning platforms anywhere in the world, as millions of Ukrainians shifted from Russian in daily life and a global audience started paying attention.

For English speakers the Cyrillic alphabet is the first hurdle and much the smallest: it is thirty-three letters, phonetic, and most learners read haltingly within a week. What follows is harder — seven cases, three genders, and verb aspect — but Ukrainian rewards partial knowledge generously, because word order is flexible and speakers are used to hearing the language spoken imperfectly by people switching to it as adults. It also opens Ukrainian literature, film and a music scene that has spent the last few years exporting hard.