Southeastern Ukrainian dialects

The Southeastern dialects (Ukrainian: Південно-східне наріччя, romanized: Pivdenno-skhidne narichchia), sometimes referred to as the Eastern or Central-Eastern dialects, are one of the three dialect groups of the Ukrainian language, alongside the Southwestern and Northern dialect groups. The borders of the Southeastern dialects reach from the south of Kyiv and Sumy oblasts to the Black Sea and from the northern or western parts of Cherkasy, Kirovohrad, Mykolaiv, and Odesa oblasts to Ukraine's eastern border. They are also spoken in Crimea as well as in Belgorod, Kursk, Rostov, and Voronezh oblasts of Russia.

The Southeastern dialects form the literary standard of Ukrainian. Phonetically, its closest relatives are the Podolian and southern Volhynian dialects, while its simplified syntax, morphology, and vocabulary are closer in nature to the Northern dialects. In contrast to other dialects of Ukrainian, which historically used the /ɡ/ sound in foreign loanwords prior to the Ukrainian orthography of 1933, the Southeastern dialects have consistently used /ɦ/ both natively and in loanwords. According to a 1969 study by Valentyna Perebyinis, ⟨ɡ⟩ is one of the least-used sounds in the Southeastern dialects alongside /dʒ/ and /dz/, at a usage rate of 0.013.