With the above illustrated aim, we want to address the following reserach questions:

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RESEARCH QUESTIONS:

1. How and in which forms does the language of the Ukrainian minorities in Vienna materialize itself, in order to preserve and construct their cultural identity through it?

2. What are the goals of such materializations of the language?

3. What role do they play in the process of preservation and construction of cultural identity?

 

CONCEPTUALIZATION:

The character of our reserach project is defined by some important sociolinguistic concepts, such as: "cultural identity", "minority", "minority language" and "space of belonging". We conceptualized them, so that they can suit our analysis. Moreover, these concepts will be used as a classification criterion in the process of content analysis and they will be addressed in our interviews, so that we can create ourselves an idea of how our interviewed persons understand and define them. 

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• We refer to "cultural identity" as representing the individual`s membership to a cultural group. This means, that a  collective cultural identity must exist and is shared by other members of the group.

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• We consider "minority" as being a sociological category of people differentiated from the social majority because of their cultural features. This category of people is developed during peoples' immigration movements.

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• With the term "minority language" we refer to the language spoken by a defined minority group.

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• The concept "space of belonging" is rooted in the field of identity theories and implies the sense of belonging of an individual, that is, the human emotional desire to be an accepted member of a certain group.

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• As mentioned at the beginning, the concepts defined above are used as a classification criterion in the process of content analysis. In addition, two perspectives are taken up that are relevant for the presentation of the results: "language as responsibility" and "language as a right". For the application of such terms, we have been inspired by the work of Klara Bilić-Meštrić and Lucija Šimičić (2017), but they are conceptualized and used differently for this investigation. Based on the results, it will be shown more precisely which position the two perspectives take.

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METHODOLOGY:

The research project was carried out as part of a qualitative social research. It is a qualitative social research because it affects people. Therefore, the subject of human scientific research are always humans. They must be the starting point and the goal of the investigation.

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We decided to use interview techniques as a first method for our qualitative social reserach. We used interviews not just as our reserach method, but also as our main method for our data collection. A further method that we employed was the "Participatory Observation". This was only applied to the subjects present at the movie night and does not work with the interviews nor with the interviewed persons. This method is standard for field research. Since we were unable to carry out a field research for reasons of time, we adapted the method for this project. Therefore, we tried to achieve the greatest possible proximity to our subjects, in order to open up the inner perspective of the discussion that took place after the movie came to an end. At the same time, we have purposefully observed our subjects, without having any influence on them and without interfering in the discussion. We have let them speak up, because they are the experts for their own content and meaning.

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INVESTIGATION PROCESS:

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• METHODS OF DATA COLLECTION - Qualitative Open Interviews

As our method of data collection we used "qualitative open interviews". The "open" character refers to the degrees of freedom of the interviewed person. That means he/she can freely answer without answer instructions, can formulate what is important to him/her in relation to the topic. And the "qualitative" character refers directly to the evaluation of the interview material. The evaluation is done with qualitative-interpretative techniques.

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• DATA DESCRIPTION

The research material consists of two interviews that took place at different times. Our questionnaire has four parts, with each part addressing a defined category. During the interviews, the structure and character of the questions changed because we found out that the people interviewed had marginal knowledge about our topic, so we spontaneously adjusted our list of questions to facilitate an efficient conversation where individuals had the opportunity to decide freely what they wanted to answer. The interviews were conducted in German, so the list of questions is in this language. Two subjects were selected who are members of the TUMA organization in Vienna, but fulfill different functions. TUMA is a Ukrainian Youth Society in Austria and is an apolitical, non-religious and not-for-profit association founded in 2010 by young Ukrainians in Vienna. The interviewed persons were chosen arbitrarily, this means they had no influence on the interview. The first test person is Yaromyr Babsky, who was interviewed on 08.11.2017 and is the director of the TUMA organization. The second subject is Taras Pinjazhko, he is a member of the organization and was interviewed on 10.11.2017. The duration of both interviews is between 14 and 17 minutes.

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• DATA PREPARATION - Literal Transcription (NOT annotated)

Literal transcription produces a complete textual version of verbally collected material, providing the basis for an interpretive analysis. The transcription system used was HIAT (half-interpretative transcriptions). This type of transcription was chosen because we only need the transcripts for the evaluation and interpretation of the content (basic transcripts). Therefore, only the utterance end signs and the reception signals were transcribed. Other conventions (e.g. pause drawing, intrasegmental phenomena, tonal fields, etc.) were not taken into account, as the annotated transcription system would require.

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EVALUATION OF DATA:​

For the evaluation of the collected data we decided to conduct a qualitative content analysis t hat will allow us to analyse texts systematically by processing the material step by step with theory-guided categorization-systems developed on the material.

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INVESTIGATION STEPS:

The reserach project took place in three steps: in the first step, the concept was planned. Here the topic and purpose of the reserach were determined. On the basis of the two criteria, we developed the reserach questions, the methodology, the investigation process as well as the evaluation process. In the second step, we selected two volunteers and interviewed them. After that, we watched an Ukrainian film during a movie night, to better understand how the cultural identity is represented by the language of the Ukrainians. After that, a group talk was held on the film topic where we only took an observational part. Our goal was to see what impressions and comments are made by the audience regarding the topic, and if there is a connection between the film and our interview results. The collected material was evaluated and the research results were processed in a website. The last step represents the research report, in which we textualized the content already contained in the website. We were allowed to mention both volunteers by name in our project, as they already appear on the TUMA website. 

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