Г vs Ґ: The Two g-Letters

Ukrainian has two letters that an English eye reads as "g": г and ґ. They look almost identical — ґ is simply г with a tiny upturned hook on top — but they spell two completely different sounds, and confusing them is one of the surest marks of a learner (or of a Russian speaker writing Ukrainian). The good news is that the distribution is heavily lopsided: г is everywhere, and ґ lives in a short, memorisable list. Once you learn that list, you have solved the problem for life. This page is about the spelling and the sound; the fine phonetic detail of the fricative lives on the pronunciation page.

The headline: г is a breathy h, not a hard g

The single most important fact on this page: ordinary Ukrainian г is not the English "g" in go. It is the voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/ — a breathy, voiced "h," the sound at the start of the second syllable of English aha or ahead, where your vocal cords are buzzing but the air is flowing freely. There is no full closure of the throat the way there is in "go."

This matters because г appears in the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian words. If you read every г as a hard /g/, you will sound foreign in nearly every sentence you speak.

Ґ: the hard g, and its short word list

The letter ґ spells the hard plosive /g/ — exactly the English "g" in go, gate, bag, with a real closure and release at the back of the mouth. It is rare. In native and long-naturalised vocabulary it appears in a closed set of a few dozen words, of which a handful are genuinely common. Learn these and you cover most of what you will ever meet:

That last example is the whole lesson in one breath: ґрунт and горо́ду both start with a g-shaped letter, but the first is a hard /g/ and the second a breathy /ɦ/. The two letters are doing genuinely different jobs.

The Soviet ban: why older and Russified texts drop ґ

There is a political reason the two letters confuse people, and you should know it. The letter ґ existed for centuries, was removed from the official orthography in 1933 during the Soviet campaign to align Ukrainian more closely with Russian (which has only one g-letter, г, pronounced /g/), and was restored only in 1990, just before independence.

The consequence: a vast amount of printed material — Soviet-era books, dictionaries, and the writing of people educated in that period — simply writes г everywhere, even in words like ганок and гудзик that should have ґ. You will see both spellings in the wild. The modern standard (the 2019 orthography and its predecessors) restores ґ in the native list above and in many proper names and recent borrowings. When in doubt for a native word, the modern, correct form uses ґ where the sound is a true hard /g/.

Loanwords: the surprising rule

Here is the part that trips up logical learners. You might expect every borrowed word that has /g/ in its source language — geology, gas, goal, Google — to be written with ґ in Ukrainian. It is not. The long-standing convention renders the foreign /g/ of most established loanwords with ordinary г, pronounced as the breathy /ɦ/:

So ґ does not automatically expand to cover the whole foreign lexicon. It stays an essentially closed list. (The 2019 standard does permit ґ in some recent personal and place names — e.g. Ґете alongside the traditional Гете for Goethe — but for vocabulary you actually need at A2, treat established loanwords as taking plain г.)

How this differs from Russian and English

For English speakers, the trap is the shape: ґ looks like a "g," and so does г, so the instinct is to read both as hard /g/. You must split that instinct in two — and crucially, you must default to the breathy reading, because the breathy one is the common case.

For Russian speakers (and English speakers who learned Russian first), the trap is the reverse: Russian has a single г pronounced /g/, so they tend to harden every Ukrainian г into /g/. That is the single most recognisable "Russian accent in Ukrainian." Ukrainian's everyday г is a feature that distinguishes it audibly from Russian — leaning into the soft, breathy sound is leaning into authentic Ukrainian. (Among the East Slavic languages, only Ukrainian and Belarusian have this fricative /ɦ/ as the default; the two-letter г/ґ system that writes the contrast is distinctively Ukrainian.)

In romanisation, the contrast is usually preserved: г → h and ґ → g in the standard Ukrainian transliteration. That is why Kyiv's Гора district romanises with h and why the surname Ґалаґан keeps its g. See the transliteration page for the full table.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• г = /ɦ/, a breathy, voiced "h" (the h in aha) — and it is the common letter, used in the vast majority of words.
• ґ = /g/, the hard English "g" — and it is rare, confined to a short list: ґа́нок, ґу́дзик, ґрунт, аґру́с, ґа́ва, дзи́ґа, and a few dozen more.
• Loanwords with original /g/ usually take plain г (газе́та, гео́лог), so ґ stays a nearly closed set — do not over-extend it.
• ґ was banned 1933–1990, so older and Russified texts drop it; the modern standard restores it.
• Defaulting plain г to a hard /g/ is the signature Russian-accent mistake — the breathy sound is authentic Ukrainian.