Attitudes and uses of Ukrainian and Russian in Ukrainian heritage speakers in Naples (Italy)

Language is an expression of cultural identity and the basis for nation building and its use is political. It is known that, after years of tensions (Marples 2021), in 2022 Russian army occupied those parts of Ukraine with higher percentages of Russian speakers. Previous studies on the effects of the war on linguistic uses in online communication demonstrated a higher use of Ukrainian as identity marker (Raceck at al. 2024), evidencing the impact of the war on online communication. Here, we investigate the impact of the war in language choice and language attitudes toward the two languages in the heritage Ukrainian communities in Naples. The corpus consists of 25 speakers of first generation Ukrainians in Naples. The corpus, collected with a sociolinguistic questionnaire, was recorded and transcribed using the Elan software. We questioned (i) how their ethnic orientation towards Italy) is related to their linguistic uses and skills in L2 Italian and Neapolitan dialect and (ii) how their ethnic orientation towards Russia is related to their use of Russian as lingua franca in Naples. Results shown (i) a very positive orientation toward Italy, that is correlated with a very positive attitude toward Neapolitan and with a good competence in Italian; (ii) a negative attitude toward Russian, used by speakers as part of their self-definition of being Ukrainian. References Kulyk, V. The age factor in language practices and attitudes: continuity and change in Ukraine’s bilingualism. Nationalities Pap. 43, 283–301 (2015). Marples, D. R.The War in Ukraine’s Donbas: Origins, Contexts, and the Future (Central European University Press, 2021). Racek, D., Davidson, B.I., Thurner, P.W. et al. The Russian war in Ukraine increased Ukrainian language use on social media. Commun Psychol 2, 1 (2024).