Negotiating multilingualism in situations of conflict

Language conflicts are rarely just about language, and political conflicts often have a linguistic dimension. A relevant and topical example is Russia's invasion of Ukraine, where one of the pretexts given by Putin's government was the purported need to defend the rights of Russian speakers. The outcome was the opposite of the (professed) intent: Traumatized by the war, many Russian-speaking Ukrainians gave up their native Russian and switched to Ukrainian in daily life.

Others reported inability to speak Russian, similar to German-Jewish survivors of World War II, who found themselves unable to speak their native German which had become intrinsically linked with the persecution and violence they had suffered at the hand of the Nazis (Schmid, 2002). Similar patterns can be seen across many countries and conflicts, impacting the ability of conflict survivors to communicate and to access services and other forms of societal participation, and often affecting mental wellbeing.

These effects are not well-known and often not recognised - for example, in the UK, Ukrainian refugees are regularly provided with Russian interpreters, based on the assumption that all Ukrainians are able to speak and understand Russian. While this is often true, the use of Russian in interactions with traumatized survivors may constitute a barrier to the effectiveness of the support that is offered.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of political and language conflict on bilingual speakers and to provide an experimentally-based analysis and account of language loss as a psychological defense mechanism. In order to gain insight into how this unfolds in different types of conflict settings, we will compare the differential lexical accessibility and fluency of Ukrainian/Russian and Catalan/Spanish through commonly used linguistic and psycholinguistic tasks measuring lexical access and fluency, and determine how individual attitudes and experiences affect the language balance in bilingual speakers of these languages.

The effects of violent and non-violent conflicts will be examined in two settings 'before' and 'after' conflict escalation: (a) Catalonia before and after the 2017 independence referendum and (b) Ukraine before and after the Russian invasion of 2022. The 'before' data come from bilingual corpora, collected in Ukraine in 2007 and in Catalonia in 2015-2017.

The 'after' data will be collected in the present study at two data collection moments, via language questionnaires, interviews, narrative tasks and standardised, widely-used psycholinguistic experiments (verbal fluency task and cued picture naming).

While the linguistic impacts of conflict for the wider society are well understood, there is little research to date investigating how this affects individuals. This study will arrive at a better understanding of how language processing, language use and language maintenance/deterioration are affected by different types of conflict and individual attitudes, and what this means in concrete terms for survivors' lives, processes of identity and identification, participation in society and ability to access support.

Based on this understanding we will articulate recommendations for language-sensitive provision of services, in particular social care, counseling and therapy, that can help provide support to conflict survivors experiencing voluntary and/or involuntary language loss. To ensure our recommendations meet the need of both the providers and the recipients of support, we will work closely with refugee-assistance organisations.

Stakeholders, partners and representatives of organisations, including the Cities and Universities of Sanctuary charities; Refugee Action; and the Pásalo Project which focuses on the relationship between multilingualism, mental health and social care, are included in the research team alongside internationally renowned experts on issues of multilingualism, identity, trauma and conflict.