Ever since Ukraine received its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, language choice has never ceased being a vital and urgent object for nationwide discussions, sometimes turning into an instrument for political manipulations or, as of late, a reason of a military conflict. Due to its dramatic history, Ukraine is still in the process of continuous identity-seeking, identity-negotiation, and identity-fighting. Choosing a mother tongue is a remarkable illustration of the current meta-discursive debate concerning language ideology in Ukraine. While people usually acquire their native languages in childhood, thanks to their geographical and social background, Ukrainians often consciously ‘choose’ their mother tongue later in life, following their political and ideological preferences.

Being situated within the poststructuralist and social constructionist theoretical framework, the book provides a comprehensive account of the Ukrainians’ ongoing discursive negotiation and renegotiation of their nationhood. Based on the analysis of dialogues and narratives, the author investigates how dialogism and positioning become central for disclosing dynamics of identity construction. The volume gives us an opportunity to not only better and more fully understand the linguistic and cultural specificity of the language situation in Ukraine, but also allows a glimpse of the processes of identity construction in discourse and through discourse.

The book is divided into eight chapters, each containing thematically and chronologically organized analyses of sociolinguistic interviews with thirty-eight respondents gathered throughout 2014 and 2015. Having started with the Ukrainian Orange Revolution (2004) as a historically crucial discursive context for Ukrainian identity construction, the work proceeds with the analysis of discourses related to linguistic and cultural identification during Euromaidan (2014), the annexation of Crimea by Russia and the war in two Eastern regions of Ukraine (2014–present).

Great attention has been paid to anthropological and sociolinguistic implications of the participants’ identity struggle at a time of war, with the main analytic focus on indexing and positioning. The author explicates discursive constructions of ‘otherness’ and ‘responsibility’ through the use of various linguistic and rhetorical devices. Chapter 5 gives the name to the book. It explores the problems of intertextuality, language embodiment, and dialogic multivoicing as a part of discursive positioning. Changing one's mother tongue to Ukrainian is seen as a conscious self-repositioning that aligns with a ‘singular construction of Ukrainian national identity’ (128). Chapter 6 describes Ukrainian diaspora identification, introducing the ‘model of immigrant identity, investment, and integration’. Through the analysis of immigrants’ narratives, the author uncovers their identity construction and reconstruction, focusing on the complexity of intersectional factors involved. Finally, chapter 7 offers an account of a different stance on the problem of language choice in Ukraine. An ideologically purist metadiscursive position of ‘a good Ukrainian speaks Ukrainian’ is no longer a necessary requirement for identifying as Ukrainian. And this is treated as eventually a new dominating ideological narrative arising in Ukraine—away from the language as a centre of national identification to globalisation and linguistic diversity.