The world should know more about the language situation in wartime Ukraine

This volume is the outcome of the international project Contested Language Diversity: Dealing with Minority Languages in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia. The project was originally funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (2020–2023) as part of its funding program «Trilateral Partnerships — Cooperation Projects between Scholars and Scientists from Ukraine, Russia, and Germany» (p. 7), which was overseen by Monika Wingender from the University of Gießen. Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, collaboration with all Russian participants was canceled. However, the Institute for Ukrainian Language of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, along with the Uzhhorod National University, and the Izmail State Humanitarian University continued their involvement in the program. Some contributors had already begun exploring «contested language diversity» in Ukraine prior to 24 February 2022 and updated their texts later. The project's guiding principle was so-called «methodological triangulation», i. e., «comparing and analyzing data from official language-related documents and language legislation, media texts, and language biography interviews (more than 100 interviews were conducted within the project)» (p. 7).