This paper analyses adolescent Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals' stances towards polylanguaging as evidenced in their talk about and use of "suržyk," a stigmatised polylingual practice that combines features from Ukrainian and Russian. Drawing from group interviews with 39 Ukrainian young people (aged 14-15), it uses Bakhtin's ("The…

The article expands the debate about the interaction and conflict of linguistic commodification with other values attached to a language. It interrogates Russian dominant discourse produced between 2010 and 2015, focusing on how it attributes the values of "pride" and "profit" to the Russian language in three transnational…

Drawing upon video recordings from two fifth-grade Ukrainian classrooms and interviews with children four years later, this paper examines these classrooms as sites for socializing learners into an "imagined community" of Ukrainian speakers, the extent to which children took up identities as members of this community, and the potential…

From the early twentieth century to the present day, Transcarpathia has belonged to several states: the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, Czechoslovakia, the Hungarian Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and finally to Ukraine. The status of what counts as a minority and a majority language has changed each time the state affiliation has been changed. Based on…

In Ukraine, the Russian and Ukrainian languages have historically alternated in policy and practice in their official status and social prestige. As in many areas of the world, English is emerging in Ukraine as a language of economic value, social prestige, and education though it is not a language of wider communication. The goal of the research…

Previous research in the field of heritage language (HL) acquisition has focused on the connection between frequency of language use and HL speakers' connection to and maintenance of their HL. This dissertation introduces the concept of positioning through discourse into the study of HLs to show evidence that while frequency of HL use contributes…