when it is no longer located in a closed syllable, such as rik (рік, 'year') (nom): rotsi (loc) (році). Similarly, some words can have і in some cases when most of the cases have o, for example слово (nominative singular), слова (nominative plural) but слiв (genitive plural). Ukrainian case endings are somewhat different from Old East Slavic, and the vocabulary includes a large overlay of Polish terminology. Russian na pervom etaže 'on the first floor' is in the locative (prepositional) case. The Ukrainian corresponding expression is na peršomu poversi (на першому поверсі). -omu is the standard locative (prepositional) ending, but variants in -im are common in dialect and poetry, and allowed by the standards bodies. The kh of Ukrainian poverkh (поверх) has mutated into s under the influence of the soft vowel i (k is similarly mutable into c in final positions). Phonology The Ukrainian language has six vowels, , , , , , . A number of the consonants come in three forms: hard, soft (palatalized) and long, for example, , , and or , , and . The letter represents the voiced glottal fricative , often transliterated as Latin h. It is the voiced equivalent of English . Russian speakers from Ukraine often use the soft Ukrainian in place of Russian , which comes from northern dialects of Old East Slavic. The Ukrainian alphabet has the additional letter for , which appears in a few native words such as gryndžoly 'sleigh' and gudzyk 'button'. However, appears almost exclusively in loan words, and is usually simply written . For example, loanwords from English on public signs usually use for both English g and h. Another phonetic divergence between the Ukrainian and Russian languages is the pronunciation of Cyrillic v/w. While in standard Russian it represents , in many Ukrainian dialects it denotes (following a vowel and preceding a consonant (cluster), either within a word or at a word boundary, it denotes the allophone , and like the off-glide in the English words "flow" and "cow", it forms a diphthong with the preceding vowel). Native Russian speakers will pronounce the Ukrainian as , which is one way to tell the two groups apart. As with above, Ukrainians use to render both English v and w; Russians occasionally use for w instead. Unlike Russian and most other modern Slavic languages, Ukrainian does not have final devoicing. Alphabet Ukrainian is written in