🇺🇦Interestingly, most people voted for Ukrainian to be the subject of my new post. So here you go — below is everything you wanted to know about the relationship of the Telegram CEO with the Ukrainian language (but were afraid to ask 🤫).

As my mom’s family comes from Ukraine, I was curious about this language since my teenage years. As a linguist by education, I was also fascinated by the differences and similarities between Ukrainian and Russian.

That’s why in 2008, Ukrainian was the first language we translated the interface of VK (my previous large project) into. Back then, most of the websites popular in Ukraine were still in Russian, but I wanted to give our millions of users from Ukraine the freedom to customize their experience. To do this, I had to rewrite most of VK’s code, replacing hardcoded Russian phrases with variables that we then translated into Ukrainian with the help of volunteers.

We were happy with the result: this launch announcement, which is recorded in the Web Archive, will make many people feel nostalgic — https://web.archive.org/web/20120104053631/http://vkontakte.ru/blog?id=70 🥲

For the next few months, I was exclusively using the Ukrainian version of VK to make sure I hadn’t missed any Russian words still hardcoded in VK’s code. I inevitably learnt some Ukrainian as a result. I also wanted VK to be the first popular website in Ukraine to introduce correct case endings for names in Ukrainian (in English, “Paul” in “Photos with Paul” and “About Paul” doesn’t change, but in Slavic languages like Ukrainian “Paul” in these phrases should have different endings depending on the case). As the one who was implementing the support for this part of Ukrainian grammar in VK’s code, I was able to learn its rules in the process.

Soon after we launched the Ukrainian version of VK in 2008, I went to Kyiv to celebrate. I was fascinated by how some words sounded in Ukrainian and would take photos with random notices in the background. People in Kyiv were very welcoming, so over the years I would come back to make new friends who would then teach me new words and fun expressions.

To keep practicing after 2022, I started completing Ukrainian lessons in the DuoLingo app. Using my DurovLingo account there, I scored 5403 experience points in Ukrainian. Currently, when browsing Telegram channels, I understand about 95% of written and 85% of spoken Ukrainian. Sometimes I have to ask one of the Telegram engineers from Ukraine to educate me on the nuances of meaning.

Overall, learning Ukrainian helped me better understand other Slavic languages: for example, my comprehension of Polish and Czech increased noticeably as a side effect. Most importantly, being able to read Ukrainian without translation allows me to make sure Telegram’s moderation processes are fair to all sides and inaccurate translation doesn’t influence any decisions in difficult cases that get escalated to the CEO level.

While Ukraine accounts for less than 3% of Telegram’s global audience, more than 70% of Ukrainians use Telegram for messaging and news, and we’re seeing more and more content in Ukrainian being published.

I hope that knowing Ukrainian — and foreign languages in general — makes me more competent as a leader of a neutral platform where rules are applied equally to all sides. We strive to be a place where everyone is treated fairly regardless of their origin and where ideas can compete freely regardless of their language 🕊