The following post was written before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The material it covers is still relevant. Слава Україні. Russian doesn’t have a letter h. The closest it has is х, which is generally rendered in English as “kh.” This leads to a problem: how do you render English words with the letter h in Russian?

For instance, take Ohio. You might think they’d do Охайо (oh-khai-oh), but it’s actually Огайо (uh-“guy”-uh) (fun fact, in Russian, the state of Illinois is pronounced as it is spelled. Same with Arkansas. Ask me why). This actually mirrors a key difference between Russian and Ukrainian: the letter г, which is pronounced as g in Russian, is pronounced as h in Ukrainian. So Луганськ/Луганск is pronounced as Luhansk in Ukrainian and Lugansk in Russian. Because there is an ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia over the city and region (which is recognized as part of Ukraine’s sovereign territory but has a population that mostly speaks Russian), you can thus generally determine someone’s side in the conflict based on whether they say Luhansk or Lugansk.

There’s another important linguistic marker that can inform you of someone’s position in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and it’s one many of you will have said unconsciously. You hear it a lot in older news clips talking about Ukraine: the use of the definite article “the” before Ukraine. Saying “the Ukraine” is a bit odd, as Russian doesn’t have definite articles (nor does Ukrainian). There’s no difference between saying “pens are big” (ручки большие) and saying “the pens are big” (ручки большие). So, where do we get the definite article when talking about Ukraine? It comes from the two different prepositions Russian uses when talking about location: в (pronounced “v” or “f”) and на (pronounced “na”). Both of them can translate as “to,” but в also means “in” while на also means “on.” You generally use в when talking about going to an indoor/enclosed location or a city/state/country. You use на when talking about going to an outdoor location, an activity, or a minor geographic feature (for example a peninsula, like Kamchatka). If I wanted to say “I’m in Russia,” I’d say “я в России.” If I wanted to say “I’m on the farm,” I’d say “я на ферме.”

During the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Ukraine was viewed as a very provincial area, as a territory; it was far less developed than Russia’s metropolitan heartland; the people in Ukraine spoke Ukrainian, which was viewed as a peasant language spoken by the uneducated; and by the time of the Soviet Union, it was just another republic in the Soviet Union as a whole (a provincial republic that the Soviets looked down upon; see: the Holodomor). As a result, Ukraine was generally given the preposition на whenever Russians were talking about going there. It was like talking about going to some kind of backwards province. That translated into English in the form of the phrase “the Ukraine.” With the breakup of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence, Ukraine has been pushing for people to say в instead of на, which has been a somewhat difficult transition. People who have always used на may be reluctant to switch, and Russian nationalists who view Ukraine as just a part of rightful Russian territory will likely still say на. Still, nowadays, if you say “the Ukraine” in English, it’s essentially reflecting Russian irredentism and nationalism. So don’t do that.

See you all at practice,

Lev “Лев Бронштейн” Bernstein

Secretary, Quiz Bowl at the Petrograd Soviet, September - October 1917