Ukrainian speakers often confuse the English H and the Ukrainian Х sound. This can be seen in a variety of places, like the common transcription of “happy birthday” as “хеппі бурздей”. When Russian speakers do this it seems to make sense – Russian does not have an “H” sound at all, so Х is the closest approximate. However, the Ukrainian letter Г produces an English H sound – so why do Ukrainians often choose Х instead of Г when pronouncing English H?

The reason, as it turns out, is that the last sentence is a lie – Ukrainian Г does not produce an English H sound. It’s important to remember that there is a repository of over 100 sounds available to humans, but that every language chooses a different subset of those sounds for their language (English uses 44 of them). Ukrainian Г is typically the voiced counterpart of English H – they are as different from each other as the English letters T and D, but native English speakers hear them as if they are the same letter.

¹ There is considerable variability depending on the dialect, context of the letter, and the exact speaker – this is just the most common realizations. For example, Ukrainian Г is also often realized as voiced velar fricative [ɣ] depending on the context – see “An Element-Based Approach to Ukrainian Back Fricatives” by Anna Bloch-Rozmej (2008)

English speakers almost universally combine the English H and Ukrainian Г into a single phoneme – we hear them as if they are the same letter, the same way many Japanese speakers hear R/L as the same letter and many Russian speakers hear H/Х as the same letter.

However, Ukrainians do not necessarily combine these the same way as English speakers – Ukrainians often treat H/Х as a single phoneme instead. This is not universal, but it is common across Ukraine – “Phonology and Attrition: Sociolinguistics of (Ukrainian) Sound Perception” by Yurii Chybras (2024) found that Ukrainians with minimal Russian-language influence perceived English H as Ukrainian Х 56.2% of the time, while those with more Russian influence perceived English H as Ukrainian Х 80.1% of the time.

So English H, Ukrainian Г, and Ukrainian Х generally produce completely distinct sounds, and the exact phoneme (letter) you hear them as depends on a lot of factors, like exposure to other languages (English, Russian, others), particular dialects/accents, and the exact phones (sounds) used for a particular word.