Ukrainian language
Phonology

The Ukrainian language has six vowels, /i/, /u/, /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /ɔ/, /a/.

A number of the consonants come in three forms: hard, soft (palatalized) and long, for example, /l/, /lʲ/, and /lː/ or /n/, /nʲ/, and /nː/.

The letter ⟨ г ⟩ represents the voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/, often transliterated as Latin h. It is the voiced equivalent of English /h/. Russian speakers from Ukraine often use the soft Ukrainian /ɦ/ in place of Russian /ɡ/, which comes from northern dialects of Old East Slavic. The Ukrainian alphabet has the additional letter ⟨ ґ ⟩ for /ɡ/, which appears in a few native words such as ґринджоли gryndžoly 'sleigh' and ґудзик gudzyk 'button'. However, /ɡ/ appears almost exclusively in loan words, and is usually simply written ⟨ г ⟩. For example, loanwords from English on public signs usually use ⟨ г ⟩ for both English g and h.

Another phonetic divergence between the Ukrainian and Russian languages is the pronunciation of Cyrillic ⟨ в ⟩ v/w. While in standard Russian it represents /v/, in many Ukrainian dialects it denotes /w/ (following a vowel and preceding a consonant (cluster), either within a word or at a word boundary, it denotes the allophone, and like the off-glide in the English words "flow" and "cow", it forms a diphthong with the preceding vowel). Native Russian speakers will pronounce the Ukrainian ⟨ в ⟩ as, which is one way to tell the two groups apart. As with ⟨ г ⟩ above, Ukrainians use ⟨ в ⟩ to render both English v and w; Russians occasionally use ⟨ у ⟩ for w instead.

Unlike Russian and most other modern Slavic languages, Ukrainian does not have final devoicing.
punctuation:no_comma