Wartime Language Choice Among Ukrainians in Ukraine and Finland: Stance-Taking and Self-Positioning

Aims and Objectives: This article examines how Ukrainians in Ukraine and Finland account for continuity and change in their language choices before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The analysis focuses on how interview participants discursively construct continuity, change, obligation, and exception in relation to Ukrainian and Russian. Approach: The study adopts a discourse-pragmatic approach combining stance-taking and self-positioning. It treats interview accounts as social action and focuses on the epistemic, deontic, affective, and evaluative resources through which speakers present language choice as knowledge, principle, emotion, and moral accountability. Data and Analysis: The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with 12 Ukrainians living in Ukraine or Finland and was conducted between 2022 and 2024. Only interview fragments in which participants explicitly relate language choice to the war or its consequences are analysed; the article examines participants’ accounts. Findings: The interview data suggest that Ukrainian is often formulated as a wartime norm, especially through deontic displays of decision, principle, refusal, and obligation. At the same time, Russian is typically accounted for not as a neutral alternative but as an exception, a residue of earlier practice, or a situational accommodation. The accounts themselves remain heterogeneous, combining continuity and change, symbolic commitment and pragmatic adjustment, and moral evaluation and emotional response. Originality: The originality of the study lies in showing how wartime language choice is discursively narrated, morally qualified, and interactionally positioned in interview talk, rather than in re-establishing the macro-level existence of language shift. Implications: The study shows how stance-taking and self-positioning make wartime language choice socially interpretable as knowledge, moral responsibility, emotional experience, and personal agency. It also demonstrates the value of combining macro-level evidence on language shift with close analysis of participant accounts.