Ukrainian as a Heritage Language Among Ukrainian Refugee Children in the UK Monika Schmid
Event details
Four years after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, 34,000 child refugees are living in the UK. Most have successfully mastered English and attend UK schools.
Among the pressures of life in a new country and with a new language - not to mention the heartache, worry and often bereavements Ukrainians in the UK suffer on a daily basis - their parents are often unaware that the war is potentially depriving their children not only of their home and their loved ones, but of a very precious resource: their native language.
Childhood language loss, up until about the age of puberty, is rapid, catastrophic and permanent, while supporting language maintenance takes a large amount of dedicated effort. Children also often resist their parents’ efforts to continue using their birth language at home, as they do not want to stand out among their peers.
Monika Schmid, Head of Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York, will report on a study of around 100 Ukrainian families. She’ll explain how they found that within the first 12 to 18 months in the UK, particularly the younger children had begun to struggle with simple tasks such as naming pictures of familiar objects or re-telling a picture book story in Ukrainian. By now, many of them will be close to passing the point of no return.
‘Ukrainian as a Heritage Language Among Ukrainian Refugee Children in the UK’ is one of a number of events taking place as part of a special edition of YorkTalks. Celebrating University of York’s research at its best, we invite you to explore a dynamic landscape of curated talks, live performances and hands-on activities staged in the historic Heslington Hall and its grounds on the theme Heritage Reframed.
About the speaker
Professor Monika S Schmid is Head of Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York (UK). She has held positions at VU University Amsterdam (Netherlands), the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and the University of Essex (UK). She holds a PhD in English Linguistics from Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf (Germany). She is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Social Sciences and the Academia Europaea. Monika’s work has focused on first and second language attrition. She has published two monographs and edited several collected volumes and special issues of journals on this topic, most recently the Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition (2019), alongside over 50 research articles and has received funding from a range of sources, including the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO) and the UK Economics and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC).
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