DANYLIW RESEARCH SEMINAR ON CONTEMPORARY UKRAINE

Wartime Language Shift as Moral Choice
in the Oral Accounts of Ukrainian Speakers

Russia’s war against Ukraine has produced waves of language shift across Ukrainian society, most significantly among speakers who had previously considered themselves predominantly “Russian-speaking Ukrainians.” The paper examines how speakers themselves narrate that transformation toward Ukrainian, and how they articulate language choice in relation to memory, belonging, moral agency and survival. It proposes the concept of linguistic moral choice: a rapid, conscious, and ethically motivated shift that requires speakers to undertake deliberate work on their own linguistic practice.

Nataliia Naumovska is a PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.