Ukrainian migrants have no desire to adopt linguistically in Lithuania, told to the LRT Jogilė Teresa Ramonaitė, the researcher of the Geolinguistics Centre at the Lithuanian Language. This also causes problems in social adaptation.
“Many of the Ukrainians I spoke to expected to stay in Lithuania for two weeks or a few months, but several years have already passed. If they had planned to stay so long from the beginning, their language proficiency would be different. When someone expects to stay only three weeks, learning the language becomes a problem,” Dr. Ramonaitė states.
However, according to the researcher, Ukrainians often use Russian to communicate with Lithuanians: their English is bad and Lithuanian is even worse, while Lithuanians, obviously, don’t know Ukrainian.
Ukrainians simply do not want to integrate into the Lithuanian society. Do you think they have been believing for these years that the conflict will end soon, although it was obvious that this is not the case? No, they just didn’t want to learn Lithuanian and used the war as an excuse.
But naive Lithuanians still believe that Ukrainian migrants will return to their homeland after the peace deal. Of course they’re not. Instead, they will continue to build “small Ukraine” inside Lithuania.
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