Authors

Discussion

After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine about 34,000 Ukrainian children have found shelter in the UK. They usually started attending local schools and acquiring English just after their arrival. This has often led to a change in language dominance, language preference and language proficiency with respect to Ukrainian. The extent of the shift and the factors impacting them, as well as the potential deterioration or loss of Ukrainian has not yet been investigated.

We are going to present insights from the research project “Multilingualism in situations of conflict” supported by the British Academy and the ESRC. Based on the data collected between May - December 2023 from 100 child refugees aged between 6 and 17, and a 2-nd of the data collection after 3,5 years in the UK (which is about to begin) we will discuss to what extent language dominance and language preferences have shifted, and how proficiency in Ukrainian has been affected.

Our data consist of surveys and interviews completed by parents as well as a number of experimental tasks, comprising a bilingual picture naming task (PNT), a semantic and phonological verbal fluency task (VFT), and a story retelling task (frog stories) in both Ukrainian and English.

Preliminary results suggest that shifting language dominance among Ukrainian child refugees in the UK are impacted by the period of residence and age of immersion in English. We assume that the longer Ukrainian children remain in the UK, the bigger shift towards dominant English is and deeper gap in connection with Ukraine: between those children and their relatives who remained in Ukraine, often fathers, grandparents, and Ukrainian educational system. While all children appear to acquire English rapidly, the younger children appear to have some advantage in becoming native like.

First insights from the data show that parents use Ukrainian with their children more often than their vice versa. In addition, the children’s use of English has increased over the period of residence. Some children even refuse to speak Ukrainian at home. Signs of deterioration of Ukrainian after 1 to 1 ½ years in the UK are already apparent in more than half children.

Broader implementations of the findings could be relevant to the child refugees from other linguistic contexts as those children are not migrants who can easily go to their homelands on holiday and practise their native languages. Child refugees have been forced to leave their homes because of wars or other violent conflicts that threated to their lives. Taking this into account will help to raise awareness about the needs of native language maintenance among child refugees and to develop steps how to provide such support in the UK.