Dissertation Research: Language and Identity in a Ukrainian Border Community

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This award to the University of Michigan supports the dissertation research of an anthropology graduate student in the Ukraine. The student will study the production of national and local political identities in a border region near Romania. Using methods of ethnography and of speech analysis and focusing on local language use, the student will test the hypothesis that national identity formation is impeded by local identities formed in contrastive interaction with nearby different local speech-dialect communities. Methods include ethnographic observation and formal linguistic analysis of biographic and topical conversations recorded in formal interviews and everyday conversations. This research is important because it will advance our understanding of how localized identities are incompatible with the ideology of national unity that underlies language standardization. Understanding how local identities contrast with national identities is of primary importance in this era of increasing `ethnic politics` and tendencies for local political fragmentation in multi-ethnic nation states. In addition the project will add to the nation's capacity for scientific research in this important region of the world.