The article attempts to clarify the role of linguistic games as a means of forming communicative competence of primary school students, which helps maintain interest in learning the Ukrainian language and aims to provide students with knowledge through their own efforts, revealing the structure and functioning of language. Linguistic play promotes the development of primary school students' idea of the basic grammatical categories and grammatical meaning of the word, which as abstract concepts are very difficult to perceive at this age. It also helps to understand the process of forming new words and master the basic word-formation patterns. Playful learning of the word promotes the development of the general speech culture of the individual, forms a subconscious understanding of the language norm and develops linguistic thinking, which is the basis of communicative competence. Systematization of teachers' experience presented on personal sites, in journal articles and methodical publications allowed to identify the most popular linguistic games used by teachers in Ukrainian language lessons in primary school, and divide them into the following groups: phonetic, lexical-phraseological, morphological, orthographic, syntactic. Given the fact that younger students are characterized by emotionality, cognitive activity, desire to fantasize, the desire to show their intelligence and skill, the role of using linguistic games in Ukrainian lessons as a means of forming communicative competence. Modern linguistic games involve competition, voluntariness, which allows students to meet their needs for mobility, get positive emotions of joy, admiration, satisfaction, realize their interests, master communication skills and more. During linguistic games, primary school students not only learn language norms and rules, but also get involved in a system of various subject-subject relations, form the ability to interact in a team, make decisions, prove their point, which will contribute to the formation of communicative competence. Key words: linguistic game, communicative competence of junior schoolchildren, phonetic games, lexical-phraseological games, morphological games, spelling games, syntactic games.