When a Crisis Creates a Language Emergency: Ukrainian case study

On 24 February 2022, Ukrainian became, overnight, one of the most sought-after languages in Europe. Tens of thousands of people found themselves in courtrooms, hospitals, and asylum centres — with no trained interpreters to support them.

Yet Ukrainian was not an unknown language. It was an invisible one.

This is not a new phenomenon. It happened with Dari, with Tigrinya, with Syrian Arabic. And it will happen again — with other languages, in other crises, following a pattern we are only beginning to understand.

This conference takes the Ukrainian case — documented, recent, and still unfolding — as a starting point for questions that concern the profession as a whole: how does a language move from invisibility to emergency? What are the linguistic, political, and institutional conditions that create these blind spots? And what can we anticipate, train for, and build — before the next crisis catches us off guard again?

Our speaker, Andrii Biesiedin, AIIC interpreter and trained lawyer, will offer a first-hand perspective on the Ukrainian reality — while opening avenues that extend well beyond this single context.

This conference is part of the LIC thematic series dedicated to training and low-diffusion languages — a series that explores, edition by edition, the structural challenges these languages pose to our profession, in ordinary times as much as in times of crisis.

Please register via the link:

https://members.aiic.org/event/ukr_lic