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• Eurasian Studies @ CREEES


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• The Alexander Dallin Lecture


• Stanford/Berkeley Joint Conference

Stanford Lectures on Ukraine

“The Interplay of Ukrainian & Russian in Contemporary Ukrainian Media”

Alla Nedashkivska, Associate Professor of Slavic Applied Linguistics,
University of Alberta (Canada)
Thursday, April 23rd, 5:15-6:15 pm
Fisher Conference Room, Arillaga Alumni Center
Contact info: Lessia Jarboe

This lecture focuses on the social meaning behind the use of both Ukrainian and Russian in various media texts in contemporary Ukraine. First, the language issue is situated within the current socio-political context; specifically, recent language debates in Ukraine in the domain of media are addressed. Secondly, examples of media texts from television programs, popular magazines, commercial advertisements and films, in which both Ukrainian and Russian are used, are analyzed with a focus on the symbolic values of language. The analysis is carried out from a perspective of code-switching, or lack of it, as a social phenomenon that is endowed with specific motivations and functions. In particular, in this study, the language use is viewed as a form of social activity in the larger social and political context in which communicative exchange occurs. And finally, the analysis of language use in media texts is linked to representations of social functions of the two languages in the Ukrainian context, providing a perspective onto questions of the language situation in Ukraine in general.

Alla Nedashkivska, a native of L’viv, Ukraine, is an Associate Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, where she teaches a variety of Ukrainian language and Slavic Linguistics courses, including a summer study abroad course in L’viv, Ukraine. She has been with the University of Alberta since 1999. Prior to her appointment at the University of Alberta, she was a visiting lecturer in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto (1996-1999). She received PhD (1998) and MA (1994) degrees in Slavic Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. Her BA (1990) is in Slavic Philology from the Ivan Franko National University of L’viv (Ukraine). Her research areas are Slavic Applied Linguistics, Language Pedagogy, Gender linguistics, and Discourse Analysis.”