Ukrainian is the official language of the Ukraine. Home speakers can be found in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Poland, the Czech Republic The vast majority of people in Ukraine speak Ukrainian, which is written with a form of the Cyrillic alphabet. The language—belonging with Russian and Belarusian to the East Slavic branch of the Slavic language family—is closely related to Russian but also has distinct similarities to the Polish language. Significant numbers of people in Ukrainian has a Cyrillic alphabet almost identical to some other Slavonic languages (Russian, Bulgarian). Some of its letters look exactly like those of the Latin alphabet used in English; however, most of these are pronounced differently than in English and may in fact resemble other English sounds. It has retained the two early Cyrillic letters і (i) and izhe (и) to represent related sounds /i/ and /ɪ/ as well as the two historical forms e (е) and ye (є). Its unique letters are the following: ge (ґ), used for the less-common velar plosive /ɡ/ sound, whereas in Ukrainian the common Cyrillic г represents a glottal fricative, /ɦ/. Vowels Ukrainian vowel chart, from Pompino-Marschall, Steriopolo & Żygis (2016 Ukrainian has the six vowel phonemes shown below. /ɪ/ is a retracted close-mid front vowel [ ɪ̞ ]. [1] Ukrainian has no phonemic distinction between long and short vowels; however, unstressed vowels are shorter and tend to be more centralized. [2] fHtg36.