Professor Halyna Shumytska joined the international team of the Migration Linguistics Lab at the University of Warsaw
A representative of UzhNU has begun collaborative research with scholars from several European countries on cultural and linguistic adaptation and heritage-language maintenance among migrants, based at the newly established Polish research centre.
The Faculty Council of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warsaw has approved the Migration Linguistics Lab, launched to deepen individual research by faculty and doctoral students within this new linguistic subdiscipline. The initiative belongs to University of Warsaw professors Svitlana Romaniuk (Lab Head) and Magdalena Olpińska-Szkiełko (Deputy Head).
The international team conducting joint research on language change (in migrants’ heritage languages and in host-country languages) — covering cultural-linguistic adaptation, heritage-language development, host-language learning, and state education and family policy; expanding international scholarly cooperation; organising conferences, seminars and workshops; and preparing joint grant applications — includes researchers from Poland (Regina Pilypavičiūtė-Gugała, Filip Mierzwa and Eidg Lewczuk of the University of Warsaw), Czechia (Dr Nataliia Holubenko of Charles University in Prague, Dr Uliana Kholodova of Palacký University Olomouc), Georgia (Prof. Zoya Adamiia of Georgian International University in Tbilisi) and Ukraine (Prof. Halyna Shumytska of Uzhhorod University and Oleksandra Antoniv of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv).
Migration linguistics extends sociolinguistic research by focusing on the relationship between language and human migration. The key question is how language changes when people change place of residence:
- language change among migrants (mixing, borrowing, grammatical simplification),
- bilingualism and multilingualism in everyday life,
- maintenance or loss of the heritage language (including intergenerational transmission),
- learning the language of the host country,
- the link between language and identity.
The Lab’s agenda closely overlaps with the work of the Research Centre for the Sociology of Language at UzhNU’s Faculty of Social Sciences, so the horizons of international cooperation continue to expand.
As a reminder, an international conference, “Dynamics of Linguistic Consciousness of Ukrainian Citizens in Conditions of War and Migration,” will take place at UzhNU on 10–12 June, with participants from Ukraine, Germany, Poland, France, Italy, Hungary and Finland.
Source: UzhNU Media Center
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