CHILDES MAIN Ukrainian-Polish Corpus

	Oleksandra Hrebenshchykova Department of Language and Culture UiT The Arctic University of Norway oleksandra.hrebenshchykova@uit.no		Anna Katarzyna Olszewska Doctoral Schools Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań a.olszewska@amu.edu.pl
	Kamil Dlugosz Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań kamdlu@amu.edu		Marit Westergaard Department of Language and Culture UiT The Arctic University of Norway
	Serge Minor Department of Language and Culture UiT The Arctic University of Norway sergey.minor@uit.no		Natalia Mitrofanova Department of Language and Culture UiT The Arctic University of Norway natalia.mitrofanova@uit.no

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Citation information

Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives – Revised material: "Gagarina, N., Klop, D., Kunnari, S., Tantele, K., Välimaa, T., Bohnacker, U. & Walters, J. (2019). MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives – Revised. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 63. https://main.leibniz-zas.de/

In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by at least one of the above references.

Related references:

Hentschel, G., & Taranenko, O. O. (2015). Movnyj landšaft Central’noї Ukraїny: ukraїns’ka mova, rosijs’ka mova, “suržyk” (užyvannja — movna kompetencija — nacional’ne pozycionuvannja) [The linguistic landscape of Central Ukraine: Ukrainian, Russian, "Surzhyk" (usage — language competence — national positioning)]. Movoznavstvo, (4), 3–25.

Kulyk, V. (2017–2018). Language attitudes in independent Ukraine: Differentiation and evolution. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 35(1–4), 265–292.

Kulyk, V. (2023). Ukrainians now (say that they) speak predominantly Ukrainian. Ukrainian Analytical Digest, 1, 6–11. https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000623475

Sokolova, S. (2022). The problem of choosing the language of communication: Ukrainian realities. Cognitive Studies | Études Cognitives, 2022(22), Article 2649. https://doi.org/10.11649/cs.2649

Soroka, Y., Kudriavtseva, N., & Danylenko, I. (2023). Language and social inequalities. In Ukraine: Monolingual and bilingual practices. Ideology and Politics Journal, 24(2), 58–85. https://www.ideopol.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/2-2023-Full-issue.pdf

Project Description

This corpus contains transcripts of audio recordings from 74 Ukrainian children aged 5–13 residing in Poland. Each child completed a Polish narrative task, and a second task administered by a Ukrainian-Russian bilingual researcher, in which children were invited to tell the story in their preferred language. The corpus therefore includes Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Surzhyk, and code-switched narratives. The narratives were elicited using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al. 2019). Data were collected in Poznań and Rawicz, Poland, during the 2023–2024 academic year. The goal of this research project was to identify factors that influence language acquisition and maintenance, and which ultimately may contribute to additive rather than subtractive multilingualism. The project explores language learning in multilingual contexts involving Ukrainian in contact with the societal language Polish. It investigates grammatical influences between Ukrainian and Polish and how these shape children’s multilingual development.

Data collection and transcription protocols

Data were collected in regular schools in two Polish cities. Testing took place individually in a separate room. Each child completed a session consisting of several tasks, including the MAIN narrative task. The order of the Polish- and Ukrainian-language tasks was counterbalanced across participants.

For the Ukrainian-language session, a bilingual native speaker of Ukrainian and Russian first established rapport with the child and identified the language in which the child preferred to tell the story. The experimenter then followed the MAIN protocol and invited the child to tell a story based on a picture sequence. We used the baby goat and baby birds narratives. No comprehension questions were asked. The resulting narratives range from predominantly Ukrainian productions with frequent code-switching into Russian, Surzhyk, or Polish to some narratives produced predominantly in Russian. The Polish session was conducted in the same way by a native speaker of Polish.

The full testing session was audio-recorded on a mobile phone using the Nettskjema Dictaphone application. Recordings were automatically uploaded to a secure server. Children were aware that the sessions were being recorded and could decline participation.

All speech relevant to the narrative task was transcribed in CLAN by the same researchers who collected the data. Before transcription, the transcribers received training in the use of CLAN from Sara Košutar, an experienced CLAN user. Transcription followed CLAN conventions. Pauses, code-switching, and other relevant features of the recordings were coded in the transcripts. Potential instances of code-switching were cross-checked collaboratively by both researchers, including possible Polish insertions in Ukrainian/Russian narratives and possible Ukrainian, Russian, or Surzhyk insertions in Polish narratives.

Sociolinguistic Context

Most participants arrived in Poland with bilingual or multilingual Ukrainian-Russian language backgrounds. This reflects the sociolinguistic context of Ukraine, where Ukrainian and Russian have historically been the most widely used languages. However, children’s experience with these languages varied: Ukrainian and Russian could differ in amount of exposure, everyday use, and productive or receptive proficiency.

Language use in Ukraine cannot be reduced to a simple Ukrainian-Russian division. It is often flexible and context-dependent, varying across family members, peers, settings, and communicative situations. For many participants, language practices underwent substantial changes after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In addition, some children may have been exposed to or used Surzhyk, a heterogeneous range of mixed Ukrainian-Russian speech practices. As Hentschel and Taranenko (2015) note, this linguistic situation is better understood as a continuum than as a strict bilingual dichotomy.

Broad regional patterns have been identified in previous research: Russian is relatively more prevalent in eastern and southern Ukraine, Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism is common in northern regions, and Ukrainian use is relatively more prevalent in central and western regions (Kulyk, 2017, 2023; Sokolova, 2022; Soroka et al., 2023). However, regional origin alone cannot be used to determine an individual child’s language use or proficiency.

Demographic data

The corpus includes data from 74 Ukrainian children aged 5–13 years (mean age: approximately 9 years), with an equal gender distribution (37 boys and 37 girls). Data were collected in Poznań and Rawicz, Greater Poland Voivodeship. Ten children attended kindergarten and 64 attended Polish primary school. At the time of data collection, children had lived in Poland for 4–77 months. Sixty-six participants arrived in Poland after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, while eight had migrated to Poland earlier. After arrival in Poland, the children began acquiring Polish as an additional language, primarily through immersion in Polish schools or kindergartens.

Full demographic information on the corpus is available here

Before data collection, parents completed a questionnaire on their child’s demographic and language background. According to this questionnaire, 20.3% of participants had lived in Western Ukraine before migration, 18.9% in Southern Ukraine, 17.6% in Central Ukraine, 12.2% in Eastern Ukraine, and 10.8% in Northern Ukraine. For 20.3% of participants, the previous place of residence was reported only as Ukraine, without further regional specification.

The questionnaire collected separate information on mothers’ and fathers’ self-reported native language(s), as well as the language(s) each parent used when speaking with the child. Most parents reported Ukrainian as their native language and Ukrainian as the main language of communication with the child. Other reported patterns included Russian-only communication; Ukrainian-Russian use; Ukrainian-Polish use; and, in a small number of cases, the use of Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish. Surzhyk was also reported as a language variety used by some parents with their children. Information on one of the parents was unavailable in some cases.

The questionnaire also asked about the contexts in which the child heard and used Ukrainian, Polish, and other languages. These questions were used to obtain a general picture of the children’s multilingual environments; parent-reported percentage estimates were not used as precise quantitative measures of language exposure. An anonymized and simplified version of the questionnaire data is available as an Excel file for download. The file includes the following participant-level information: age at testing (in years-months-days), gender, region of origin in Ukraine, mother’s and father’s native language(s), languages used at home, other languages the child uses, and length of exposure to Polish (in months).

Acknowledgements

These data were collected within three projects: Multilingual Minds – Grammar Interaction in Multilingual Acquisition (grant no. 2547028) and Multilingual Onset, Variation & Attrition (MOVA): Language Development and Language Preservation of Ukrainian Refugee Children in Europe (grant no. 2766780), both supported by the Research Council of Norway; and Acquisition & Attrition: Crosslinguistic Effects of Structural Similarity – Ukrainian Meets Polish, German and Norwegian (AcqCESS; Centre for Advanced Study, Oslo, 2023–2025).

We warmly thank Dr Kamil Długosz and Dr Jakub Przybył for their invaluable help in organising the data collection, liaising with participating schools, and ensuring that the process ran smoothly. We are grateful to the school principals, teachers, staff, and intercultural assistants for their hospitality and effective support. We also sincerely thank the participating children and their parents for their openness, time, and willingness to take part in the study.

We also acknowledge the defenders of Ukraine, whose courage makes the continuation of Ukrainian scholarly and cultural life possible.