Dissertation Research: Language and Identity in Ukraine

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This project involves the dissertation research of a linguistic anthropology student from the University of Michigan. The student will study the use of language in the Ukraine, contrasting how people use and react to others' use of the Ukrainian and Russian languages. The newly independent country has decreed that Ukrainian is the official language. In part of the Ukraine, German, Hungarian, Polish, Czech and Romanian have alternately dominated education and public life. The project will study how people strategically use language to effect their social and political goals in three regions: Kiev, the capital city, Kharkiv, an industrial and cultural center in the north-east, and a small city in south-western Ukraine. Methods include participant observation, taped interviews including evaluations of speech samples, and the matched guise test, a procedure whereby people react to and evaluate along various social and emotional dimensions the same text read by speakers in several different languages. This project is important because it will add to our expertise in this rapidly changing area of the ex-Soviet Union, and will advance our understanding of the role of language in establishing political and social identities in newly independent countries.