LINC - Linguistic Integration of Refugee Children and their Families

This collaborative project investigates the linguistic integration of Ukrainian refugees across four countries around the Nordic-Baltic region: Sweden, Norway, Estonia and Lithuania.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is one of the greatest challenges of our time, having led to a massive westward exodus of Ukrainian refugees. Families consisting mainly of women and children have fled a bilingual society where both Ukrainian and Russian are spoken and must now adapt to life in a new country with a different majority language, for an indefinite period of time. At the same time, Ukrainians’ attitudes towards Russian and Ukrainian are changing in response to the war. Host countries are faced with the challenge of integrating refugees into society, and for this integration language is key.

This collaborative project investigates the linguistic integration of Ukrainian refugees across four countries around the Nordic-Baltic region: Sweden, Norway, Estonia and Lithuania. These countries offer diverse examples, with different historical, political, cultural and social factors, yet none was prepared for the current situation. This project will therefore map, analyze, compare and evaluate language policies and practices in these countries.

To investigate policies relating to language at the state level (macro-level), we will conduct a comparative analysis of policy documents. For practices at the institutional level (mid-level), such as schools, we will use online survey-based sociolinguistic methods (with adult Ukrainian refugees, largely mothers), complemented by interviews with teachers. Regarding the individual (micro-)level, we will do interviews with refugees about their experiences in the host country.

The qualitative data will then be related to language measures in the respective host language. Methods will be kept constant across the four countries. The research results will produce new knowledge on linguistic integration as well as new insights regarding best practices. In this way, we will contribute to society’s understanding of the complexities of changing language practices and attitudes in linguistic integration.

Future scholarly applications include methodological resources developed in the project, including surveys and interview models, and particularly an open-source database of comparable semi-structured speech data (narratives) by Ukrainian refugee children and adolescents to be used by other researchers. Practical applications will be science-based recommendations for practitioners and policy-makers.

Funding Agency: NordForsk

Project number: 191524 (link to project page on NordForsk website)

Call: Research projects under the Nordic-Baltic initiative for migration and integration research

Research area: Nordic initiative on Migration and Integration Research