Ukrainian: a reference manual for Mova

This folder is an open reference grammar of modern standard Ukrainian, written for Mova and for anyone who reads Mova's code. It describes the language as it is spoken and written today: the literary standard and its 2019 orthography, the permitted colloquial usage of educated speakers, and, as deltas over the standard, the regional varieties, the older forms that live on, surzhyk and the registers, song among them.

Ukrainian is at once very conservative and very modern. Old forms (the vocative, the synthetic future in -му, the remnants of the dual) are ordinary everyday speech, while the standard follows usage and the dictionaries catch up within years. The manual describes the norm descriptively: what people say and write, how the 2019 orthography codified it, which variants it allows, and where usage is ahead of the code or behind it, with counts (0. Introduction §4).

Each chapter states the facts, gives the rules and their exceptions, shows tables and many examples, cites its sources, and says how Mova handles the point today: which file implements it, and where Mova does not handle it yet.

What Mova can do with Ukrainian today is small. The English tree parser (en), trained on a Ukrainian treebank after en xpos-fill has mapped its tags to the Penn tag set, gives on UD Ukrainian-ParlaMint (UD 2.18, train → dev, 2026-11-06) LAS 79.28 with its own tags and 81.34 with gold tags, and on UD Ukrainian-IU 73.43 and 78.17; the tag set has no case, and Ukrainian syntax rests on case. Mova's own Ukrainian code is the kg crate: a VESUM-based analyser and synthesizer, a seven-case grammar code, a conservative simple-sentence parser and a generator, under a non-commercial dictionary licence. There is no Ukrainian phonology, stress model, transliteration, spelling normaliser or variety model in Mova. The chapters say, construction by construction, what that covers and what it does not.

How to read it

Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic, followed on first use by a scholarly transliteration and a gloss: хата (xata) 'house'. The transliteration is described in 5. The writing system §9.3. Stress is marked with an acute where it matters (ру́ки : руки́).
Sounds are in the IPA, phonemes between slashes and pronunciations in square brackets.
Word classes and forms are named three ways: in traditional Ukrainian terms, in Universal Dependencies tags and features (NOUN, Case=Voc, Aspect=Perf, VerbForm=Conv) and in the VESUM tags (noun:anim:m:v_kly, verb:perf:futr:s:1). 10. Word classes has the full table.
Examples:
- ParlaMint-UA_…: a sentence from UD Ukrainian-ParlaMint 2.18 (CC BY-SA 4.0), quoted sparingly with its sent_id;
- UD Ukrainian-IU 2.18, Brown-UK and VESUM are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: the chapters count them and quote none of their sentences;
- the Leipzig Corpora Collection samples ukr_news_2018, ukr_news_2024 and ukr_wikipedia_2021 (CC BY) are counted, not quoted;
- unmarked examples are constructed for this manual.
Measurements carry their date. Counts made for this manual were made on 2026-11-06 over the files named next to them.
Sources are cited briefly in the text, e.g. (Simovych 1919 §112), (Pravopys 2019 §74), and listed in full, with licences and library paths, in Sources: chapters 00–19 for chapters 00–19 and in the list of the second half for chapters 20–38. Each chapter also ends with its own short list.

Sounds and writing

file	what it covers
0. Introduction	What Ukrainian is: family, history in brief, typological profile, the standard and how it moves (conservative and modern at once), variation as deltas over the standard, the vocabulary; the notation of the manual; what Mova does with Ukrainian today
1. Consonants	The 32 consonant phonemes; hard and soft dentals; hushing consonants and affricates; г and ґ; в as [u̯]; no final devoicing; long consonants; frequencies
2. Vowels	The six vowels; и and і; weak reduction; the iotated letters; і/и in loans; the о, е ~ і alternations; prothesis; frequencies
3. Syllable, stress and intonation	The syllable; free mobile stress: minimal pairs, paradigm stress types, variant stresses, codified stress and common deviations; clitic groups; intonation in outline
4. Connected speech	Euphony: у/в, і/й, з/із/зі/зо, б/би, ж/же with counts; assimilation of voice and softness; cluster simplification; consonant alternations
5. The writing system	The 33 letters and their names; ь, the apostrophe, ґ; є, ї, ю, я, щ; stress marks; the national, ISO 9 and scholarly transliterations; the history of the script
6. Spelling rules and the 2019 orthography	The 2019 orthography: principles, vowels and consonants, prefixes and suffixes, writing together or apart, loans and foreign names, endings, the variants it allows; the earlier orthographies; where usage stands against the code
7. Punctuation, capitals, abbreviations and numbers	Punctuation by the 2019 code with treebank counts; quotation marks and direct speech; apostrophe, hyphen and dash characters; capitals; abbreviations; numbers and dates; how the tokenizer treats them
8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk	The dialect groups and regional colour in the standard as deltas over it; the Galician and Dnieper norms; the diaspora; surzhyk as a contact variety; songs; Rusyn
9. Older Ukrainian and the old forms alive today	Old East Slavic heritage, Middle Ukrainian, Zyzanii and Smotrytskyi, the new literary language; older spellings; the vocative and other old forms alive today

Forms and words

file	what it covers
10. Word classes	The ten parts of speech of Ukrainian grammar, UD and VESUM side by side; predicatives; words in several classes
11. Nouns	Gender, animacy, number; the seven cases and the vocative; the four declensions; stem alternations; the masculine genitive -а/-у; the 2019 changes and usage; indeclinables; plural-only nouns
12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals	Personal pronouns and н- after prepositions; possessives and свій; demonstratives, interrogatives, negatives, indefinites; numerals and their government; collective and fractional numerals; ordinals
13. Verbs	Aspect pairs; the two conjugations; -ся; the three futures; imperative; conditional; pluperfect; participles, adverbial participles and the -но/-то forms
14. Irregular verbs, alternations and stress	бути, дати, їсти, -вісти, іти/йти; stem-changing verbs; consonant alternations in conjugation; stress patterns; a reference table with counts
15. Adjectives and adverbs	Hard and soft adjectives; short and uncontracted forms; possessive adjectives; comparison and the compared term; intensive suffixes; adverbs; predicatives
16. Derivation: prefixes	Verbal prefixes, aspect and modes of action; stacked prefixes; noun and adjective prefixes; the spelling of з-/с-, роз-, без-, пре-/при-/прі-, пів
17. Derivation: suffixes	Agent nouns; feminine personal nouns and measured usage; diminutives and augmentatives of every class; abstract and action nouns; adjective and verb suffixes; productivity
18. Compounding, conversion and minor processes	Compounds and linking vowels; hyphenated compounds; stump compounds and abbreviations; substantivised adjectives; univerbation; clipping, blends, reduplication, onomatopoeia
19. The lexicon: where the words come from, multiword expressions and register	The layers of loans; purism and measured usage; russianisms and anglicisms; war vocabulary; registers from official to slang, surzhyk and song; multiword expressions and idioms

Syntax and pragmatics

file	what it covers
20. Syntax overview	Syntax in the Universal Dependencies frame
21. Clause structure	The simple clause
22. Phrases	Noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases
23. Complementation	Complementation
24. Coordination and subordination	Coordination and subordination
25. Relative clauses	Relative clauses
26. Questions	Questions
27. Negation	Negation
28. Voice and the passive	Voice and the passive
29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure	Ellipsis, word order and information structure
30. Pragmatics: an overview	Pragmatics and discourse: overview
31. Speech acts	Speech acts
32. Politeness and hedging	Politeness and hedging
33. Implicature and presupposition	Implicature and presupposition
34. Irony and figurative language	Irony and figurative language
35. Reference and coreference	Reference and coreference
36. Discourse relations	Discourse relations and coherence
37. Register and variation	Register and variation: literary, permitted colloquial, surzhyk, song
38. Dialogue and discourse markers	Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech

The form chapters (00–19) link to these where a point belongs to syntax or pragmatics.

Sources

Sources: chapters 00–19: every source cited in chapters 00–19, with its licence and slug in the research library; the sources of chapters 20–38 are listed by the second half.

Mova's Ukrainian at a glance

point	where it lives	chapter
tokenization (apostrophe inside words, hyphens, abbreviations)	`en/src/tok.rs` (with `en tok-eval`); `kg/src/uk.rs` (`tokenize`)	07
normalisation (apostrophe variants, stress marks, invisible characters)	`kg/src/morph.rs` (`norm`, `invisible`)	03, 05
tag mapping UD → Penn for the `en` parser	`en/src/main.rs` (`xpos_fill`, `xpos_of`)	10
morphology: analysis and synthesis	`kg/src/morph.rs` over VESUM `dict_corp_vis.txt.bz2`	11–15
grammar code (7 cases, gender, aspect, animacy…)	`kg/src/gram.rs` (`Gram`, `Gram::from_vesum`)	10, 11, 13
simple sentence → fact, government from VESUM	`kg/src/uk.rs`	11, 12, 13
fact → sentence	`kg/src/textgen.rs`	04
Wiktionary counts	`tools/wikt-count` (`uk` mode)	03

Licence

The text of this manual is ours, under the Elamur Cosmic License (Elamur Cosmic License). Short quotations and examples from other works keep their own licences, named in the source lists: sentences from UD Ukrainian-ParlaMint (CC BY-SA 4.0) are quoted sparingly, never carried in bulk; UD Ukrainian-IU, Brown-UK and VESUM (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) are used for measurement only (Data and model licences). The 2019 orthography is an official document and not protected by copyright.

The Elamur team

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/

🗣️ Ukrainian: a reference manual for Mova