This article deals with the phonology of the standard Ukrainian language.
Stress
Stress is phonemic in Ukrainian. With most Ukrainian nouns, the stress falls on either the final vowel of the stem or the initial vowel of the inflection. In a few nouns the stress may be further forward. The position is generally fixed for the various cases of the noun (though inflection stress shifts to the last vowel of the stem if the inflection is a zero suffix), but may change with number (stem stress in both singular and plural, e.g. теа́тр ~ теа́три 'theater'; stem stress in the singular and inflection stress in the plural, e.g. жі́нка ~ жінки́ 'woman'; and so on for all permutations.)
The pattern with adjectives is similar to that of nouns, but does not differ between singular and plural (all stem stress or all inflection stress). In some inflection-stressed adjectives, stress shifts to the stem in the comparative.
With most verbs, stress falls on a syllable in the stem. That syllable may differ between the perfective and imperfective aspects (verbs with 'shifting stress'), but otherwise the stress remains on the same syllable for all inflections. A small group of verbs which do not shift for aspect and have е in their stems bear stress on the inflection. That stress is always on the last syllable of the word apart from in the future imperfective, where it is on the same syllable as in the infinitive (INF нести́, FUT.NPFV.3sg нести́ме 'carry').
With numerals, stress placement may differ between ordinal and cardinal forms.
For names, stress may shift between given names (Богда́н, Рома́н) and family names (Бо́гдан, Ро́ман), and between patronymics (Іва́нович, Богда́нович) and family names (Івано́вич, Богдано́вич).
Vowels
Ukrainian has the six vowel phonemes shown below. is a retracted close-mid front vowel .
Ukrainian has no phonemic distinction between long and short vowels; however, unstressed vowels are shorter and tend to be more centralized. The unstressed vowel allophones are as follows: remains more or less . and approach , which may be a shared allophone for the two phonemes. is realized as . is realized as , or more towards if it is followed by a syllable with or . is realized as .
Consonants
In the table above, whenever two consonants share a cell, the one to the left is voiceless, while the one to the right is voiced.
Phonetic details: There is no complete agreement about the phonetic nature of . According to some linguists, it is pharyngeal (when devoiced, or sometimes in weak positions). According to others, it is glottal . After voiceless consonants, word-final , , are voiceless , , . For , this only happens after . is most commonly bilabial before vowels but can alternate with labiodental (most commonly before ), and it can be a true labiovelar before or . It is also vocalized to before a consonant at the beginning of a word, after a vowel before a consonant or after a vowel at the end of a word. If occurs before a voiceless consonant and not after a vowel, the voiceless articulation is also possible. is often realized as a single tap . are dental , while are alveolar . The group of palatalized consonants consists of 10 phonemes: . All except have a soft and a hard variant. There is no agreement about the nature of the palatalization of ; sometimes, it is considered as a semi-palatalized consonant. The labial consonants only have 'semi-palatalized' versions, and has only the 'hard' variant. The palatalization of the consonants is weak; they are usually treated rather as the allophones of the respective hard consonants, not as separate phonemes. Unlike Russian and several other Slavic languages, Ukrainian does not have final devoicing for most obstruents, as can be seen, for example, in "cart", which is pronounced , not . The fricative articulations are voiced allophones of respectively if they are voiced before other voiced consonants. (See #Consonant assimilation.) do not form a perfect voiceless-voiced phoneme pair, but their allophones may overlap if is devoiced to (rather than ). In the standard language, do not form a voiceless-voiced phoneme pair at all, as does not phonemically overlap with , and (voiceless allophone of ) does not phonemically overlap with .
When two or more consonants occur word-finally, a vowel is epenthesized under the following conditions: Given a consonantal grouping 1()C2(), ‘’ being any consonant, the vowel is inserted between the two consonants and after the . A vowel is not inserted unless is , , , , , or . Then: