Amko
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What if we assume that the Russian language initially appeared as a kind of slang?
And, in fact, how many people in Ukraine actually speak the state Ukrainian "language"? Unfortunately, not many.
According to a survey conducted in 2004 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), 43–46% of the population of Ukraine uses the Russian language at home (that is, less than the Ukrainian language).
According to the Public Opinion Foundation (2002), in the regional centers of Ukraine, 75% of the population prefers to communicate in Russian (and only 9% in Ukrainian)[61], and continuous areas of the Russian language exist in rural areas in Crimea, Donbass, Sloboda, in the south of the Odessa and Zaporozhye regions, and isolated Russian dialects exist in the central regions and in Bukovina.
According to a survey conducted by Research & Branding Group, 68% of Ukrainian citizens freely speak Russian (Ukrainian – 57%). Russian is most widely used in the eastern and southern regions, where it is more common than Ukrainian for 92% of citizens[62].
According to a study by the American Gallup Institute, conducted in 2008, 83% of respondents prefer to use Russian for communication [63].