The official language of the Republic of Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, Ukrainian is a member of the Eastern group of the Slavic Indo-European family of languages along with Russian and Belarusian. With about 44 million total speakers, native speakers represent about 83% of the inhabitants of the Ukraine. Another 1.5 million Ukrainian speakers live in Poland. Small communities of less than half a million speakers also exist in Canada and the United States. Ukrainian is written in a modified Cyrillic alphabet where additional letters have been incorporated to represent sounds such as "h" that do not exist in Russian. An ongoing movement whose goal is to strengthen the position of Ukrainian as the national language of Ukraine, and to minimize the use and prestige of Russian, continues to gain strength both at home and among Ukrainian communities abroad.