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Leveraging Mediated Receptive Multilingualism: A Case Study of Estonian-Ukrainian Communication
Fri, June 14, 2:00 to 3:30pm, William L. Harkness Hall (100 Wall St., Enter off of College St.), WLH, Room 208Abstract
In today's globalized world, interlocutors employ various multilingual practices to facilitate communication across different languages, language variations, etc. An example is the communication in Estonia between Estonians and Ukrainians in their respective languages. Estonians can reach an understanding of Ukrainian using their proficiency in Russian since Ukrainian and Russian are typologically related (Indo-European, East-Slavic). On the other hand, Ukrainians employ their acquired passive Estonian language skills. The mode of communication, when interlocutors use their respective languages when speaking to each other is called Receptive Multilingualism, RM (Rehebein et. al 2011). When understanding is facilitated through a third language (in this context, Russian), that is typologically related to the target language (in this case, Ukrainian) it refers to the mediated RM type (Branets, et. al 2023) and this study addresses this case.
40 participants grouped in dyads of 2 participants each were involved in the experimental investigations. The study comprised the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to check participants' language attitudes, the sociolinguistic questionnaire to check their sociolinguistic background, explicit language attitudes and exposure, two online spoken conversations using the MapTasks method, and debriefing.
The results have shown that mediated RM has a potential in Estonian-Ukrainian communication. The success rate of the task completion is provided. The findings demonstrated that Estonians employed diverse communication strategies and linguistic vocabulary when communicating with Ukrainians. Such factors as language attitudes, language exposure, experience in multilingual situations, meta-linguistic awareness, and learnability are proven to enhance comprehension. In addition, this study demonstrates the language learning potential.