Many Russian speakers in Ukraine have switched language – but changing perceptions may be much harder

By Oleksandra Osypenko, PhD researcher in linguistics, Lancaster University

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a lot of Ukrainians who would normally have used Russian as their first language started instead to speak only in Ukrainian. It was part of a cultural shift, particularly in areas close to Russia. Streets were renamed, statues of Russians taken down and Russian literature taken off the shelves of bookshops.

But language does more than merely signal a person’s identity. We wanted to find…

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