LANGUAGE AND ETHNO-NATIONAL FEATURES OF THIRD AND FORTH UKRAINIAN IMMIGRATION VAWES IN USA

Abstract

The article is devoted to the issues of theoretical and empirical exploring of Ukrainian migration to USA in its sociocultural dimension. It is aimed to inquire such issues as migrants’ language identities and corresponding practices and special ethnonational features of Ukrainians in USA. The authors’ theoretical concept is a basis for empirical survey on Ukrainian migration to USA conducted in 2015. 40 semistructured interviews with Ukrainians who experienced living in USA were collected during the research. The benefits of this study are the isolation of language identities and practices from ethno-national and cultural ones. Moreover, this study tested its main issues in the context of «old» (postwar) and «new» (independence period) Ukrainian immigration.

The main outcomes of research are as follows. Language identities and practices of Ukrainian immigrants are not simple, they consist of several parts. For the third wave, Ukrainian and English language identities/practices are common. For the fourth wave three constituents are common, namely, Ukrainian, Russian, and English ones. The use of definite language depends on communication context. Language question turned out to be stumbling block in the third and fourth waves’ immigrant’s relations. «Old» immigrants were not ready to accept Russian-speaking Ukrainians. At the same time, «new» immigrants (even Ukrainian speaking) do not identificate themselves with the Ukrainian «diaspora language», that contains Polonisms, Ukrainian archaisms, English-structured sentences in Ukrainian. Other differences there also detected. Though the respondents of «old» wave prefer the membership of traditional official organizations, the respondents of «new» wave prefer new, network-structured informal organization/communities. Besides, Ukrainian constituent of «old» immigrants’ cultural identity and corresponding practices is based mainly on Ukrainian ethnonational belonging. At the same time, Ukrainian constituent of «new» immigrants’ cultural identity and corresponding practices is influenced by Ukrainian ethnicity, Soviet period of Ukrainian history and some outlandish cultural practices widespread in independent Ukraine. Soviet past is also significant in the post-Soviet belonging recognition of fourth wave immigrants and common naming of immigrants from post-soviet states as «we». The main criteria of settlement area choice is another difference. For the «new» immigrants it is job opportunities instead of old Ukrainian diaspora presence. The difference in types of third and fourth waves of migration could explain this choice. Third wave is mostly political migration and the clear majority of the fourth wave immigrants, in contrary, represents classical labor migration. In summary, the survey showed a row of differences in language and ethno-national features of studied waves of Ukrainian immigrants in USA.