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I’m just going to chime in on your feedback section on this podcast. I am not a linguist, but I am fairly certain that Ukrainian is a distinct language from Russian. I can speak Russian at a “get by” level, and have often traveled with Russian speaking people. On those journeys, we traveled through Kiev, and there was a language barrier there for sure. Many of the words are completely different, and there is a complete extra case for nouns (6 in Russian, 7 in Ukrainian). Usually I have found that you can get by if it is a difference in dialect, but this was more than that.
Did I say something else in this episode? If I did, that was by mistake!
No, you only said that you were going to look into it, but that now would not be a good time to read results on this query on google.
The problem is that the definition of what is a language is a lot less clear cut as people may think. The border between a dialect (which can have its own words, grammar and its own pronunciations) and a language is often as political as its linguistic.
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