Ukrainian as a Language-Culture under Threat: Digital Documentation, Translation and Textual Memory in Documenting Ukraine
in: Contemporary Debates And Interdisciplinary Approaches In The Social Sciences, Humanities, And Administrative Sciences, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Orhan ŞANLI, Editor, Duvar Yayınları, İzmir, pp.177-201, 2026
- Publication Type: Book Chapter / Chapter Research Book
- Publication Date: 2026
- Publisher: Duvar Yayınları
- City: İzmir
- Page Numbers: pp.177-201
- Editors: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Orhan ŞANLI, Editor
- Istanbul University Affiliated: Yes
Abstract
The vulnerability of a language cannot be measured only by speaker numbers, legal status or institutional recognition. A language may remain widely used and still become fragile when the textual, cultural and interpretive conditions that sustain it are placed under pressure. This study examines Ukrainian as a language-culture under threat through a corpus of thirty publicly accessible digital texts selected from the Documenting Ukraine section of the Institute for Human Sciences website (https://www.iwm.at/documenting-ukraine). The corpus is treated as a curated digital textual environment in which documentation, testimony, translation, cultural memory, authorship and future archiving intersect. The analysis combines thematic coding, philological close reading and discourse analysis. It shows that Ukrainian textual memory in the corpus is organised through five interrelated patterns: documentation and future archive as textual operations; translation, bilingualism and untranslatability; testimony as textualised experience; heritage, place and cultural continuity; and epistemic agency and future interpretability. The study argues that the future of a threatened language-culture depends not only on whether texts survive, but on whether the conditions that make those texts interpretable are preserved.