What kind of ukrainian do I actuallty speak

[aball12345]

for a couple months now I have been trying to learn ukrainian, which was spoken by my grandmother.

I have checked out all of the ukrainian learners books in my local book store but this is what happened Ie.

they say the #1 is "odyn" and the #2 is "dva" but here is how my grandmother says them:

#1=yeden
#2=dwa

another example is "what" my grandmother says "sto"

[Irinka]

By your examples it sounds like your grandmother speaks a bit of Russian It's hard to tell..give me a few more words. Where exactly did she come from?

Irina

[SweetNovember]

Irinka, you think Russian?
#1=yeden sounds Polish to me....

[Irinka]

It's hard to judge from transliterated text. I'd like to see more words.

[dyvchynameg]

I had some notes laying around on the Croatian language, which is very similar to the Ukrainian and Russian languages. In Croatian, 1= jedan(yedan) and 2= dva. Maybe this is what you're looking for. Also, as was said before- those numbers seem pretty equal to Polish.

[Scar_ua]

SweetNovember is right -- this words sound Polish. Words, you grandmother uses, are the western-Ukrainian dialect, that was used for 19th-20th centuries in Ivano-Frankivsk (Stanislav) region, Lviv region and partially in Chernivtsi region. My grandmothers also used such words: "yeden" for "one", "shtyry" for "four", "pyet'" for "five" and so on... This words sound like Polish but they are old currently unused original ukrainian words, but not russian, of course

Although there are many people in small villages in Western Ukraine who still use such style of speaking till now...

[Lubov]

That's right, in the language of Western Ukraine Polish influence is very strong. The books that you checked out are based on the literary version of Ukrainian which, in it's turn is based (both vocabulary and pronunciation) of the dialects spoken in Kiev and Poltava oblasts. Hence the difference.