Ukrainian phonology


This article deals with the phonology of the standard Ukrainian language.

Stress

Stress is phonemic in Ukrainian. With most Ukrainian nouns, the stress falls on either the final vowel of the stem or the initial vowel of the inflection. In a few nouns the stress may be further forward. The position is generally fixed for the various cases of the noun, but may change with number
The pattern with adjectives is similar to that of nouns, but does not differ between singular and plural. In some inflection-stressed adjectives, stress shifts to the stem in the comparative.
With most verbs, stress falls on a syllable in the stem. That syllable may differ between the perfective and imperfective aspects, but otherwise the stress remains on the same syllable for all inflections. A small group of verbs which do not shift for aspect and have е in their stems bear stress on the inflection. That stress is always on the last syllable of the word apart from in the future imperfective, where it is on the same syllable as in the infinitive.
With numerals, stress placement may differ between ordinal and cardinal forms.
For names, stress may shift between given names and family names, and between patronymics and family names.

Vowels

Ukrainian has the six monophthong phonemes shown below. is a retracted close-mid front vowel.
FrontCentralBack
Close
Mid
Open

Ukrainian has no phonemic distinction between long and short vowels; however, unstressed vowels are shorter and tend to be more centralized. The unstressed vowel allophones are as follows:
  • remains more or less.
  • and approach, which may be a shared allophone for the two phonemes.
  • is realized as.
  • is realized as, or more towards if it is followed by a syllable with or.
  • is realized as.

Consonants

In the table above, whenever two consonants share a cell, the one to the left is voiceless, while the one to the right is voiced.
Phonetic details:
  • There is no complete agreement about the phonetic nature of. According to some linguists, it is pharyngeal . According to others, it is glottal.
  • After voiceless consonants, word-final,, are voiceless,,. For, this only happens after.
  • is most commonly bilabial before vowels but can alternate with labiodental, and it can be a true labiovelar before or. It is also vocalized to before a consonant at the beginning of a word, after a vowel before a consonant or after a vowel at the end of a word. If occurs before a voiceless consonant and not after a vowel, the voiceless articulation is also possible.
  • is often realized as a single tap.
  • are dental, while are alveolar.
  • The group of palatalized consonants consists of 10 phonemes:. All except have a soft and a hard variant. There is no agreement about the nature of the palatalization of ; sometimes, it is considered as a semi-palatalized consonant, meaning that it is only weakly palatalized. The labial consonants only have 'semi-palatalized' versions. The palatalization of the consonants is weak; they are usually treated rather as the allophones of the respective hard consonants, not as separate phonemes.
  • Unlike Russian and several other Slavic languages, Ukrainian does not have final devoicing for most obstruents, as can be seen, for example, in "cart", which is pronounced, not.
  • The fricative articulations are voiced allophones of respectively if they are voiced before other voiced consonants. do not form a perfect voiceless-voiced phoneme pair, but their allophones may overlap if is devoiced to . In the standard language, do not form a voiceless-voiced phoneme pair at all, as does not phonemically overlap with, and does not phonemically overlap with.
  • only appear in onset positions: духмяний, пюре, бюро, свято, рятувати.
When two or more consonants occur word-finally, a vowel is epenthesized under the following conditions: Given a consonantal grouping 1C2, ‘’ being any consonant, the vowel is inserted between the two consonants and after the ь. A vowel is not inserted unless is,,,,, or. Then:
  1. If is,,, or, the epenthesized vowel is always.
  2. * No vowel is epenthesized if the is derived from a Common Slavic vocalic *l, for example, .
  3. If is,,, or, then the vowel is.
  4. The combinations and are not broken up.
  5. If is, both the form with the epenthetic vowel and the form without it can be found.

Alternation of vowels and semivowels

The semivowels and alternate with the vowels and respectively. The semivowels are used in syllable codas: after a vowel and before a consonant, either within a word or between words:
This feature distinguishes Ukrainian phonology from Russian and Polish, two related languages with many cognates.

Consonant assimilation

Ukrainian has assimilatory voicing: voiceless obstruents are voiced when preceding voiced obstruents.
  • наш дід
There is no such assimilation in the reverse direction.
With a few exceptions, there is no word-final or assimilatory devoicing in Ukrainian. The exceptions are легко, вогко, нігті, кігті, дьогтю, дігтяр, and their derivatives: may then be devoiced to or even merge with.
Unpalatalized dental consonants become palatalized if they are followed by other palatalized dental consonants. They are also typically palatalized before the vowel. Historically, contrasting unpalatalized and palatalized articulations of consonants before were possible and more common, with the absence of palatalization usually reflecting that regular sound changes in the language made an vowel actually evolve from an older, non-palatalizing vowel. Ukrainian grammar still allows for to alternate with either or in the regular inflection of certain words. The absence of consonant palatalization before has become rare, however, but is still allowed when the і succeeding a consonant originated from older о, evidenced by о preserved in some word forms such as стіл / стола.
While the labial consonants cannot be fully phonemically palatalized, they can still precede one of the iotating vowels є і ьо ю я, and are realized as semi-palatalized, with many speakers replacing the would-be sequences with the consonant clusters, a habit also common in nearby Polish. The separation of labial consonants from is already hard-coded in many Ukrainian words, such as in В'ячеслав "Vyacheslav", "name" and "five". The combinations of labials with iotating vowels most commonly occur in loan words, e. g. бюро "bureau", as well as in certain native words when following consonants and followed by or, e.g. духмяний "aromatic", мавпячий "monkey ", and цвьохнути "to clang". Such combinations are written without the apostrophe after consonants in the same morpheme, e.g. свято "holiday". Unlike other semi-palatalized labial consonants, can have a distinguishing role in words, e.g. свят "holiday, G pl." and сват "matchmaker".
Dental sibilant consonants become palatalized before any of the labial consonants followed by one of the iotating vowels є і ьо ю я, but the labial consonants themselves cannot retain full phonemic palatalization.
Sibilant consonants in clusters assimilate with the place of articulation and palatalization state of the last segment in a cluster. The most common case of such assimilation is the verbal ending -шся in which assimilates into.
Dental plosives assimilate to affricate articulations before coronal affricates or fricatives and assume the latter consonant's place of articulation and palatalization. If the sequences regressively assimilate to, they gain geminate articulations.

Deviations of spoken language

There are some typical deviations which may appear in spoken language. They are usually considered phonetic errors by pedagogists.
  • for
  • for and or even for
  • for, for, for in certain words
  • or for, in effect also turning into a true voiceless-voiced phoneme pair, which isn't present in the standard language
  • Final-obstruent devoicing

Historical phonology

Modern standard Ukrainian descends from Common Slavic and is characterized by a number of sound changes and morphological developments, many of which are shared with other East Slavic languages. These include:
  1. In a newly closed syllable, that is, a syllable that ends in a consonant, Common Slavic *o and *e mutated into if the following vowel was one of the yers ; for example, CSl. *pêktь → Ukr. піч & CSl. *nôsъ → Ukr. ніс.
  2. Pleophony: The Common Slavic combinations, *CoRC and *CeRC, where R is either *r or *l, become in Ukrainian:
  3. # CorC gives CoroC
  4. # ColC gives ColoC
  5. # CerC gives CereC
  6. # CelC gives ColoC
  7. The Common Slavic nasal vowel *ę is reflected as ; a preceding labial consonant generally was not palatalized after this, and after a postalveolar it became. Examples: Common Slavic *pętĭ became Ukrainian ; Common Slavic *telę became Ukrainian ; and Common Slavic *kurĭčę became Ukrainian .
  8. Common Slavic *ě, generally became Ukrainian : CSl. * → Ukr. ці́лий ; except:
  9. # word-initially, where it became : Common Slavic *ěsti became Ukrainian
  10. # after the postalveolar sibilants where it became : Common Slavic *ležěti became Ukrainian
  11. Common Slavic *i and *y are both reflected in Ukrainian as
  12. The Common Slavic combination -CĭjV, where V is any vowel, became, except:
  13. # if C is labial or where it became -CjV
  14. # if V is the Common Slavic *e, then the vowel in Ukrainian mutated to, e.g., Common Slavic *žitĭje became Ukrainian
  15. # if V is Common Slavic *ĭ, then the combination became, e.g., genitive plural in Common Slavic *myšĭjĭ became Ukrainian
  16. # if one or more consonants precede C then there is no doubling of the consonants in Ukrainian
  17. Sometime around the early thirteenth century, the voiced velar stop lenited to . Within a century, was reintroduced from Western European loanwords and, around the sixteenth century, debuccalized to.
  18. Common Slavic combinations *dl and *tl were simplified to, for example, Common Slavic *mydlo became Ukrainian .
  19. Common Slavic *ŭl and *ĭl became. For example, Common Slavic *vĭlkŭ became in Ukrainian.