Discourse and Practice of Bilingualism

Discourse and Practice of Bilingualism presents the results of an international sociolinguistic project which compared bi- and multilingual situations in present-day Ukraine and Russia. The trilateral project was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (2016–2019) within the framework of its funding programme “Trilateral Partnerships – Cooperation Projects between Scholars and Scientists from Ukraine, Russia, and Germany”. This volume presents the contributions to the project’s starting conference in Gießen in 2017. The volume’s contributors investigate current language and education laws, their impact on the bilingual language situations and the discourses that are initiated and determined by the current language policy measures. The present volume consists of an introduction to the project’s methodical foundations with regard to the analysis of language conflicts, followed by five thematic sections dealing with discourse and practice of bilingualism in Ukraine and Russia. The articles are based on broad field work, consisting of mass surveys and focus group interviews, which reveal novel insights into the current bilingual language situations in Ukraine and Russia. The book comprises both broad overviews of the language situations and detailed insights into various spheres of the societies.