It is well known that most Ukrainians have been affected by the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As a result of traumatic experiences, the attitude towards the Russian language has changed significantly, as it now represents the “language of the enemy” for many. This change in attitude has impacted children and adults’ language processing in Russian and Ukrainian, their abilities to maintain these languages, and often has caused deterioration of proficiency of their first languages.
We are going to present some insights from the research project “Multilingualism in situations of conflict” supported by the British Academy within the Researchers at Risk Fellowship Programme. We report findings from the first data collection phase that has been conducted between May and December 2023 from 231 Ukrainians (adults and children), who came to the UK or other European countries, as well as from adults who have stayed in Ukraine after the Russian invasion in February 2022.
Our data consist of a survey and interview with participants in which they report their use of Ukrainian and Russian in different periods of their lives prior to invasion, and since that. Participants between 6-65 years old also completed a bilingual (cued) picture naming task (PNTs), a semantic and phonological verbal fluency task (VFTs), and narrative tasks (Frog story retelling and Charlie Chaplin). While the adult participants completed the tasks in Ukrainian and Russian, the children participated in a Ukrainian/English version.
Preliminary results suggest that many of the speakers demonstrate involuntary suppression of the Russian language as a psychological defence mechanism to protect themselves against the “language of enemy”. It causes reduced accessibility of Russian lexical items. Others try to replace the Russian language by English. Participants who had switched into Ukrainian before the full-scale invasion express a higher level of the language resilience than those who decided to change the dominant language after the invasion. However, for many Ukrainians, the Russian language remains a component of linguistic consciousness as even participants with the dominant Ukrainian language demonstrate the usage of quite large number of Russian lexical items.
Even though language proficiency is quite balanced in Ukrainian and Russian among adults, the cost incurred by switching and mixing is higher in the Russian PNT than it is in Ukrainian, and the productivity advantage in Russian seems lower on the phonetic than on the semantic version of the VFT. There also appears to be some impact of attitudes towards Russian on the phonetic, but not on the semantic VFT. These initial observations indicate that there may indeed be a stronger inhibition effect when accessing Russian than when accessing Ukrainian.
