Language Revitalization in Exile: Language Ideologies and Language Practices of Belarusian 'New Speakers' among the Post-2020 Diaspora in Poland and Lithuania

• In Event: Belarusian Culture II: Post-2020 Memory Practices

Abstract

Since the fall of 2020, tens of thousands of young Belarusians who actively participated in the mass protests against the Lukashenka regime chose to go into emigration rather than risk arrest and imprisonment, loss of employment and other forms of retaliation from the authorities. Estimates of the total number of Belarusians who have left their country in connection with the post-August 2020 government crackdown and the onset of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine in February 2022 range from 500,000 to 600,000, with Poland and Lithuania receiving the largest numbers of émigrés (Kulakevich 2022). There is evidence that this new diaspora differs in important ways from previous waves of emigration from Belarus, not only in its socio-economic composition and its degree of politicization (Kulakevich 2022), but also in its attitude toward the use of the Belarusian language. It appears likely that Russia’s ongoing full-scale war against Ukraine, and the revulsion toward Russian imperialism and political, cultural and linguistic expansionism that it has engendered among many Belarusians, have further heightened the salience of the Belarusian language as a marker of non-Russian identity among members of the new diaspora.

Many of the most active proponents of the use of Belarusian among the new diaspora in Poland and Lithuania are themselves “new speakers,” individuals who were raised in urban Russophone families, but chose to refashion their linguistic identities and practices either prior to or after emigration, speaking the minoritized national language primarily or exclusively in their peer groups and in everyday life. While the study of language maintenance and language shift among immigrant communities is well established in the field of sociolinguistics, the phenomenon of immigrants changing their linguistic repertoires not only through the acquisition of the language of their host country, but also through acquisition and/or increased use of a “heritage” language, has not previously been addressed by researchers in a systematic way.

In this paper I will discuss some of the preliminary findings of an ongoing study of the social identities, language ideologies, language attitudes and language practices of the post-2020 Belarusian diaspora in Poland and Lithuania. Using data from focus group interviews conducted in Warsaw, Wrocław, Gdańsk, Cracow, Białystok and Vilnius, as well as a large-scale online survey of post-2020 Belarusian emigres in Poland and Lithuania conducted in the spring of 2025, I will focus in particular on “new speakers,” their ideological stances (as reflected in explicit metalinguistic discourse and language attitudes) and linguistic practices, both in terms of domains of language use and degree of preference for forms that are more divergent from those of their first language, Russian (these include both standard variants associated with the pre-1933 Belarusian standard, regionalisms, borrowings from Polish, Lithuanian, and other European languages, as well as divergent innovations resulting from hypercorrection). I also will address the role of “language planning from below” in shaping the language practices of the new Belarusian diaspora, that is, how various Belarusian diaspora organizations in Poland and Lithuania manage linguistic diversity among their constituencies and set, observe and enforce policies for language use.

Author

• Curt Woolhiser, Boston College