MOVA - Multilingual Onset, Variation & Attrition

After February 2022, over 6 million Ukrainians have fled their home country and are currently residing in Europe, more than 30% of them being children and adolescents. Their multilingual abilities are rapidly changing, with the next couple of years being pivotal in capturing the multilingual dynamics of this population. Simultaneously with the developing competences in the languages of their new host countries, it has become crucial for the multimillion Ukrainian community in Europe to preserve their Ukrainian identity and language in a challenging context when the languages of the new host countries become the dominant languages of communication for the children. Identifying factors that promote additive rather than subtractive multilingualism is therefore of great importance. In this context, the task of understanding the complex dynamics of multilingual language development and maintenance calls for large-scale comparative studies. MOVA will explore changing language competences in four different contexts – Ukrainian in combination with Polish, Czech, German, and Norwegian and triangulate cutting-edge theoretical and experimental approaches to multilingual acquisition with advanced statistical modeling techniques. The selected countries—Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Norway—are among those with the highest proportions of Ukrainian refugees, facilitating participant recruitment. Recruiting participants from 6 to 16 years of age will enable a detailed investigation how the age at which immersion in a new societal language starts may affect: a) the acquisition of the additional language; b) potential attrition (change) in the first language; 3) acquisition of a foreign language in school. The results of the project will inform a comprehensive model of multilingual grammatical representations and will contribute to developing educational strategies that preserve the children's first languages while enhancing communication skills in the societal languages.

Funding agency: Research Council of Norway

Project number: 359553

Call:  Researcher Project for Scientific Renewal FRIPRO

Grant amount: 12 MNOK