Multilingual Picturebooks and Involuntary Displacement: I Want to Speak Ukrainian

Bilingual and multilingual picturebooks have developed significantly over the last fifty years. Intended to help immigrant children to learn the language of their host country, these texts now serve to revitalise Indigenous languages, celebrate the multilingual landscape of countries that have more than one official language, and give prominence to the practice of translanguaging, a process of switching and mixing languages which enhances the development of cognitive abilities during childhood. They also help develop intercultural and metalinguistic awareness and inspire important conversations on empathy, acceptance, and respect in times of forced displacement. This chapter introduces I Want to Speak Ukrainian, a multilingual picturebook in English, Irish, and Ukrainian, created by the chapter’s author and her student Bláithín Breathnach in the summer of 2022 in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of that same year. The picturebook was designed to serve as a point of contact in Irish schools between displaced Ukrainian children and their Irish counterparts. Its aim was twofold: to help its Ukrainian readers understand the role of the Irish language and Irish culture in Irish children’s lives and to teach its Irish readers a little about the Ukrainian language and culture.