 Thank you, Joey. So it's my great pleasure to introduce Professor Yustina Olco from the University of Warsaw, who's going to be talking to us about recent research into what she calls the ethnolinguistic cure, what she'll explain all about it, I think herself, that's much better than I can, about how languages can be a real benefit to people, particularly in recovering from historical traumatic situations, which of course we can see at the moment all the more relevant, unfortunately. So Yustina is a full professor at the University of Warsaw. We got to know each other through collaboration on a three-year project funded by the European Union called Engaged Humanities, which made links between people all around the world involved in Engaged Language revitalization. And Yustina is carried on working in that field and she is now, I think, is it the first woman in Poland to hold two major European Union grounds and also the first person outside the hard sciences to do that, which I mean she's really good in her field, she's not just a rising star, she is now a star in the heavens in our field, so very pleased to introduce her and welcome Yustina. Hello, good afternoon. I would, I won't, I won't follow with any introduction. You know my name is Yustina Olko and I'll be speaking today about not just my individual research, but team research that relates to the ethnolinguistic or language cure that can be applied to communities speaking Engaged languages, not so much applied, but actually applied by them to successfully revitalize a language and lower and higher and I'm sorry, and counteract some adversities like historical trauma or the impact of ethnic discrimination. And I will start with some, sharing some general thoughts of that relate to linguistic theory theory on linguistic evolution that perceives small languages in the context of this of this broader evolutionary trends and I'll start with the quote as if a smaller fish gets into contact with a big fish it is the smaller fish which is more likely to disappear, which sorts of says this agenda or this inevitable path of disappearance for local small and vulnerable languages. And this is in accordance with the notion it's of course difficult to question because it is many ways true that speakers operate in the linguistic market in which languages like modern terracurrences acquire economic values. And this also has a profound impact on locally spoken languages. And another quote from Salito Comofuene, just as ecologists say to roll the dice in biological evolution languages also evolve at the mercy of socioeconomic outcomes in which they are embedded. While I agree with this statement, I want to emphasize that some implications that the most important implications of this theory included this notion that speakers of indigenous languages abandon their heritage times in their efforts to achieve socioeconomic advancement and benefits associated with merging with the dominant society on a path of assimilation. And whether some scholars may argue that there are benefits on this assimilation path, we are also becoming increasingly aware of the consequences of the loss of heritage languages that involve trauma, poorer health, including higher rates of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, psychological problems, and even suicide rates among the youth, the children and the youth in endangered language communities. And this problem is especially silent, has been especially salient in the United States in the reservations and also in Canada. So this evolution is not neutral to speakers of endangered languages. And this is the point I want to make in the beginning of this talk. On the other pole of this spectrum of consequences of language loss, we can also look for benefits. And one of such such paths, beneficial paths has been established by a social psychologist working on so called social cure. This is an idea introduced by Jatin Haslam and Haslam. And basically, what they emphasize, and they have found out a lot of experimental research on that, is the role of positive social identities that are important for achieving positive physical and mental health outcomes, deriving from meaningful belonging in social groups with a range of different, it can be very different contexts. The social identification is especially important when we think about the sense of belonging to local communities. And this belonging unlocks a range of psychological benefits with positive implication of health is also a growing body of evidence on that. However, this research does not explicitly include the use of endangered languages, just the social, the role of social identity. In the team project called languages secure linguistic vitality as a tool for psychological well-being, health and economic sustainability that we started in December 2017. And I co-directed this project along with Professor Miho Bilevich, social psychologist from the University of Warsaw. We wanted to look both at the positive role for the maintenance of heritage languages and also immigrant languages on the one hand, and on the other hand, on the consequences of language loss and ethnic discrimination on the well-being and health of community members. One of the first results that we had in achieving this project related to our work with the WEMCO community in Poland. In general, the project embraced several ethnic minority groups in Poland, the WEMCOs, Vilamodians, the Kashubians, and in the last step also the Seligian and Ukrainian immigrants, and also speakers of Nauat in Mexico, speakers of Nauat Piquil in Salvador. And in the last stage also we launched some research in ethnic minorities and immigrants in Italy in Calabria. Regarding these first results, and this is the publication of research that was mostly headed by our former PhD student Magdalena Skrodska, it focused on the role of the usage of WEMCO in the context of historical trauma, because the WEMCOs are one of the most historically traumatized communities in Poland as they were victims of the displacement action called Operation Vistula in 1947. They were taken away from their land and forced to settle in areas where in Western Poland where they were subject to harsh assimilation policy. In this case study, we looked at how people who were born after the Operation Vistula and did not experience this event themselves, how they were assuring the facts of historical trauma, transgenerational historical trauma. And we found out that even if people who speak the WEMCO language more frequently share a higher level of availability of trauma, they are aware of this trauma, the history of the community, because it's mostly or to a big degree transmitted in the WEMCO language. Those who use the language more frequently have lower symptoms of historical trauma. And this line for frequent speakers and the dotted line and the solid line is for very users of the language. So this led us to the conclusion that actually speaking the language provides a sort of protection or shield against the negative effects of historical trauma, the symptoms of trauma which were examined within a separate trauma symptoms scale, even if all these people share the sense of historical traumatization. So this was the initial funding and then we saw an important line of our research focused on studying the relationship between language use and different forms of well-being, of indigenous or local well-being. And I have to say in the beginning that there are several limitations or challenges to this research. First of all, of course we knew by studying previous research that the retention of indigenous languages has been linked to the well-being of these speakers and has been perceived as acting as a protective factor for psychological and physical health. For example, it's associated with lower levels of diabetes among indigenous people of North America or as a factor lowering almost to zero suicide rates in Native communities. But the exact nature of this relationship between language and well-being and also positive health outcomes continues to be elusive. And to make things more complicated we have to say that the construct of well-being is used in psychology and other disciplines is not clearly defined and it's used interchangeably with notions of health, quality of life or the sense of happiness. And also a broad number of studies across the world including very interesting research carried out in Australia and New Zealand has shown that using traditional Western criteria of well-being including social, economic and psychological well-being doesn't really align with indigenous notions of well-being. And that we shouldn't use this Western tool to assess the level of indigenous well-being because indigenous people tend to have a more holistic, relational and collective view of health, happiness and good life. And we have to account for this in our research and it differs from community to community. What is important also to emphasize is that culturally and indicators of well-being in previous research do relate to language attention, cultural continuity, autonomy and the sense of belonging. So here you can see there's some kind of possible connection to the social cure mechanism and this was one of the ideas that guided our research. In our approach we introduced a novelty and this novelty was actually that we did not include a sort of variable if the language is present or not but we measured in our panel studying all of these communities an actual frequency of use of the heritage language and the dominant language in different domains of life. Also we also measured emotions as positive emotions and negative emotions associated with speaking. In this way we want to emphasize and recognize the emotional dimension of that non-linguistic vitality and also of language use, attachment to local identities and language use. And here we drew on very important research by Provenco that shows that emotions mediate in linguistic decisions and in linguistic choices and are crucial for maintaining desirable identities and also rejecting those identities which are not quite desirable for speakers. The results of this research are published in open access in this paper that you can see on this slide. It was just published online three months ago in cultural diversity and ethnic minority psychology. It's a team research that includes also our indigenous collaborators from Mexico who carried out the field research for this positive relationship between indigenous language use and community-based well-being in four Nahuas ethnic groups in Mexico. These are the ethnic, the Nahuas groups in Mexico. They are in several regions in Jilitla, Chicomtepec, Clashcala and Atliaca and they differ very much actually despite sharing some cultural values and basically the same language that's used in its regional variants, they differ in terms of language attention and the degree of assimilation toward the dominant culture. And it's actually very important to differentiate this and not treat other speakers of this language as just one homogeneous group because they are not homogeneous. They live in different socioeconomic conditions and so for example in Atliaca in Guerrero and in Chicomtepec, traditional economy and social relationships have been preserved to the biggest degree according to the last national census. 80% in Atliaca still know the Nahuat language and around 60% in Chicomtepec and they also practice in Chicomtepec traditional forms of religion that's providing a strong support to the community and rituals. Jilitla in San Luis Potosí is more intermediate so it's still there's considerable language use around 40% at least and and some forms of traditional economy but it's very much eroded and they did the communities rely on state's help and sort of like mixed economy and in Clashcala which is more urbanized zone close to Mexico City and the assimilation has been the strongest so the language loss is severe with a few speakers left and almost no children speaking the language and young people being passive speakers and also this almost full transition to wage economy in Clashcala and this is important for the outcomes to understand the outcomes and if you if you if you look at this this diagram that shows language use it's actually very well reflected which you can see here this is based on average values of declared frequencies of language use of Spanish and Nahuat in different domains of life so this this this purple line here indicates the the average level the average value for equal use of Nahuat and Spanish everything that's more toward the center in the interior of the circle is almost only Spanish more Spanish or exclusively Spanish everything that's outside the purple line the violet line is more Nahuat or exclusively Nahuat and here you have the different communities so you can see Chico and Tempec in Veracruz is most the vitality of the language I mean the usage of the language is as the biggest followed by Atliaca then Hilitla the intermediate community say intermediate on the assimilation path and Clashcala is very much reduced you can see here and the domains that are still present it's obviously with parents and grandparents here in traditional ceremonies and family events also when using when uh when uh recurring to local health specialists or healers right it's still pretty pretty strong and neighbors these are this this this community-based networks of language use but it's dropping very much with children even in these traditional communities which shows that the transmission is no longer in place we were expecting to find a higher vitality in Atliaca because according to the census results the there are 80 percent of people knowing the the language then Chico and Tempec but in our survey it actually came out as lower a bit lower than than than Chico and Tempec but this is actually explained by the age of participants at the survey so here you have a number of participants of our quantitative survey from each community the total of 552 and in Atliaca you can see that the age average was just 33 years whereas in Chico and Tempec was almost 60 years of age so this explains the difference because the older the people the more now they use uh which this explains the distortion probably if we compare speakers of the same age Atliaca would have the similar or higher rates of of now at use okay so this was our sample and I want to comment on on basic instruments we used so we relied on the methodology of social psychology here even we also included some social linguistic tools we we we as much as was possible we we tried to adapt this to local conditions so for example such a local local tool was a well-being scale the scale means that there are a number of questions that relates to a common topic and then you calculate average values um from answers um on these scales on the scale from one to five for example indicating frequency or how much we agree with a certain statement and this gives you variables that refer for example to the level of of well-being and this amic scale of well-being was was developed for the purpose of the present study to reflect community-based well-being and was entirely based on on qualitative research in the communities and the main author of the scale is our researcher PhD student Gregore Haimovic and he he worked out the scale along with community members then we use the Spanish and now at use across everyday domains the results you saw on the previous diagram then we we use the scale measuring positive emotions related with the use of now at so and also negative emotions but the the analysis show which are actually positive and which are negative emotions what do you experience when you when you speak the language and we use also a purely psychological tool used in many cultural contexts satisfaction with life scale overall to develop back in the 1980s that measures a more individualized psychological sense of well-being and we uh we wanted to test the hypothesis that the relation between the use of now in in the family domain and community-based well-being is mediated by positive emotions that speakers experience when they speak they had this language so these are this this this this two models it's actually one model um and I'll explain to you so we have uh now at use in the family domain that's mediated by positive emotions and uh how it relates to community based well-being and you can have the direct effect and you can have a total effect here measured that includes the mediation role of positive emotions then we also and this model worked we basically found this path significantly significant but we didn't want to generalize to show the same effect for communities that differed so much in terms of their language attention and their ways of life so we uh we created um an actually person that's responsible for the for the calculation of this model is um is professor Katarzyna Lubieska from our university cross-culture psychologist uh she calculated a moderated mediation model that she introduced the belonging to a specific ethnic group so the four groups that we have and it turned out that the only uh statistically relevant path for this moderated model was for the community of Akiaka the one that's most traditional that supposedly had more according to their sense was more most use of Mawak and indeed it worked because uh the direct effect uh was not significant on the total effect where positive emotions were in play and this path that people who uh to speak the language experience most positive emotions are related to Mawak and they have a higher community based well-being that reflects their sense of happiness uh based on community networks of support uh spending time with community members generally having good interpersonal relationships in the community and this was the partial mediation and then we also since this was not significant for other communities we tested another hypothesis hypothesis number two that there is a direct relationship between community based well-being and the use of Mawak in the family domain we use the family domain because we knew that it was uh the one that worked okay we couldn't achieve uh I would say uh reliable results when when when checking how uh who domains that were basically absent like the usage of church or in uh with authorities influence well-being because we know that people really don't don't very rarely use they had this language there so with the test hypothesis we we looked at the direct relationship across the groups without looking at the role of positive emotions we assume that uh if they don't speak often enough then this emotional dimension may not be as active as with speaker who speak the language on a daily basis and this was the model so there was like a direct part between language use in family and community based well-being and moderated by belonging to the group and it turned out actually that this model worked very fine for the remaining three communities uh you can you can you can see here uh Attyaka is in the that had this um mediated uh emotionally mediated model is in the lower this is the lower line and the effect was not significant it was significant for Contla which is here the most Contla Intlashkala the most assimilated community then for Helitla which was in the in the uh let's say uh medium level of assimilation and then for Chicca de Pepe but the effect is is the strongest for uh the most assimilated community of Contla Intlashkala here you can see the levels of well-being here on the left side you see low use of Nahuatl in family and high use of Nahuatl in family so you can see for speakers using more Nahuatl in family they have higher sense of well-being and this effect this effect is the strongest in the most assimilated community where very few people are very rarely or I would say rather more rarely use Nahuatl because there are there people who are secret speakers or uh uh you know speakers speakers who don't really use the language every day but when there is a safe space or family events or or some kind of celebrations they do use the language or with with other members of the community and it didn't work for Attyaka because there the model really the path the mechanism was based on the level of positive emotions so we concluded this part of our research in the the following way that the protective role of heritage language use with regard to well-being may be stronger in the communities that are more affected by assimilation processes than in more traditional communities because these communities are more in the need of healing and restoring recovering from historical trauma from assimilation pressure and even if they don't use the language very much it does have a very positive effect on how they feel this is a very I think a strong point to make for communities in favor of language revitalization and to make it more explicit about what kind of community we are talking about these are some uh some uh some uh fragments of interviews from our uh quality field were carried out in this community of complaint that showed the amount of of shame and suffering associated with language use which obviously had this impact on the fact of that the transmission has been uh uh broken or almost broken uh so there is one uh one testimony here about uh schooling and the discrimination at school my mother told me that when she was at school and also my father-in-law was telling us the same that they would beat them if they spoke now what so they were speaking Spanish not now what and you know people don't really uh talk too much about these experiences they are too painful so um and also about the sense of guilt of not passing the language to their grandchildren and children and another testimony perhaps one or two persons still talk now uh this is about a neighboring community San Pedro del Coapan but the majority no longer speak it has already perished they are ashamed they do not want to speak and even even in this context the the the impact we could really find evidence quantitative evidence for the positive impact on um of language use on on on emig will be but I also want to stress that this this is not so simple because the general context is a context of very harsh ethnic discrimination and its long elastic effects in they let's say counterbalance and it positive there's positive effects of language use and we cannot forget about the other side of the coin so using the same data along with the the experts from the um medical college of the Avalonia University public health experts uh professor um um uh professor Groszinała Jesieńska, Dr. Andrzej Galbarczyk, Karolina Miukowska and also community members community scholars uh in Mexico we looked how uh the symptoms of PTSD related to perceived ethnic discrimination and also acculturation stress experience in the workplace are associated with health outcomes and they do they are associated with higher risk of poor self-rated health in all of these four regions in Mexico also we found that acculturation stress discouragement of language use so people get you know discourage against using the language avoiding to speak the language because of different reasons and discrimination ethnic discriminations were related to a higher risk of depression and PTSD so this research implies that ethnic and linguistic discrimination acculturation stress and long-term effects reflected in the symptoms of PTSD are important predictors of poor health and depression among the SNOWA groups in Mexico and there's also research in other cultural contexts outside Mexico I'm not aware of any similar study like that in Mexico but on other continents again um US, Canada and Australia are leading in this kind of research that shows the negative outcomes of ethnic discrimination and we also related this statistical outcomes to qualitative research provided by indigenous researchers that shows this research shows long lasting effects of violence, discrimination, acculturation stress of our children at school and this is very um uh difficult situation because they say uh there are some healing mechanisms and protection mechanisms in the community you can resort when you are harmed when you are afraid when you when you suffer the the loss of your salt and elderly you go to specialists but they did not apply to school children just outside the context of ritual practices so the the parents would recruit children for poor school school result and would eye themselves with teacher discrimination against children who come to school don't speak Spanish and they have to start to do everything in Spanish right away and some of them they went to three, four, five grades we don't learn Spanish and they were beaten they were they were do a mug they were offended so on and they couldn't really get any support in the community and uh it was also experience of some of our collaborators so this has lost it has left long term um symptoms of PTSD even in the elderly people that when they were talking about their school years about their youth times what kind of stress they experienced because of that uh we also uh wanted to extend this model and and and verify this model in our in in other case studies uh looking at this uh this association uh between um uh zekal between well-being and and language use and actually uh we we um Professor Rwanda Ducz-Pfeiffer who is a WEMCUR researcher had this hypothesis that uh among the WEMCURS it would work uh the the the path the the mechanism for enhancing well-being will not be based on the usage of language at home but on the usage of language uh in public domains because this requires courage this requires uh consciousness awareness this this um this uh is associated with more um personal um sense of um uh um well I want to say courage but also um um uh it it it more contributes uh confidence your confidence as a speaker it contributes more to the sense of self achievement uh because WEMCURL language obviously is still spoken in some families but it's absent from public life in Poland so when you want to form the spaces and use it you have to find these obstacles and indeed what we what we tested and this was the in this case the analysis were were performed by Magdalena Skorocka we found out that indeed when we looked at the the relationship between the usage of the WEMCURL in different domains in the family domain and we looked we included positive and negative emotions in the model and we did not include the psychological scale swls the psychological well-being it was not significant for speaking the language in at home but it was significant for for those uh for people who use the language in public and it actually uh this part is significant but only in uh it's significant when we look at positive emotions so people who use the language in public uh have more emotional emotional attachment to the language and they have higher level of individual psychological well-being so this this this result is pretty clear and we also uh carried out similar uh studies uh looking at immigrant uh Ukrainian immigrants in Poland it's not based on the current context it's based on uh on data collected in 2018 and 2019 and here it didn't work that way the situation of immigrants is is different what what we found out was a positive uh positive uh was a statistically significant mechanism was the use of immigrant language in family again positive emotions were in play and life satisfaction was higher but this model uh only worked in the indirect way so the positive emotions have to be um in considering the model because the direct effect is negative so the direct association is the model of her immigrant language you speak the lower your well-being is psychological well-being is in the sense of achievement you know realizes self-realization confidence is lower and this is uh this is even more complicated when we consider there are some important differences between uh speakers of Ukrainian and speakers of Russian uh and because the the bilingualism of of Ukrainian people is is is very complex and in um generally as speakers of Russian perform well uh worse in the um in terms of occult of acculturation and it was because even before the war Russian language was more associated as the language of Russia and not the the national language of Ukraine Ukraine Ukrainian language has been promoted in the last two decades as the national language and many speakers of Russian adopted the language even if they spoke Russian at home so you can imagine how the situation is is even now is more complicated now for those Ukrainians who are um speakers of Russian uh in this context so I don't want to develop this this line any further I only want to to to say that this is a very um pressing issue now in the context of war refugees who are not just uniformly speakers of Ukrainian they are mostly bilingual speakers with different family experiences of using both heritage languages also the Russia right and this this study requires a lot of um we have to be very careful when drawing results from from this kind of study and we have to contextualize this and we'll be working on the on the Ukrainian case study uh in in the future to to look at the the connection all of this also implies that there are both costs and benefits of language of appellation uh because the communities are on the one hand exposed to trauma that's associated with their ethnolinguistic identity but they also can potentially the ethnolinguistic cure that they can unlock for their own benefits and to deal with trauma and this costs and risks also extend to the revitalizers of the language and this is precisely one of the topics explored by uh our PhD student or the project members Yustina Mayerska Scheider from Villa Mavice who is a community-based scholar she is a speaker of the Miss Yerusha highly endangered language, Germanic language evolving in Czech and Polish environment since the 13th century and heavily persecuted and discriminated against after the Second World War that is almost perished and here on this picture you can see two revitalizers of the language persons whom the language is thanks to whom the language is still used and spoken in some spaces in the community. Yustina Mayerska Scheider and Yustina is currently finalizing her dissertation titled local concepts of well-being and cultural revitalization the case of Villa Mavice and here are the the major fundings of Yustina that actually relate very well to other points I'm making in our points we are trying to make in this project and actually provide some more context for a better understanding of these challenges. So right now the Miss Yerusha which is a highly endangered language spoken in southeastern Poland a southwestern Poland is an element of social identity and people a lot of people perceive it as an important factor enhancing their amic sense of well-being but the language has been transformed from the coat of a narrow group of speakers who use it in hiding during the years of persecution and discrimination afterwards the years of trauma to a more inclusive many medium that also raises children and youth from neighboring communities who oppress the Villa Mavice in this violent post-war events we sometimes say that they are the grand children grand children of the oppressors of Villa Mavice who want to learn the language and it's become a medium that's used by by the Villa Mavice youth and also other people on site who are willing to learn this highly endangered language and there's a positive association between strong local identity higher levels of amic well-being this is what Yustina shows and also engagement in language revitalization but language activists and users are more strongly affected by historical trauma and language discrimination they are they are you know basically this this this front line if there are attacks or attempts to to ridicule the language to discriminate the speakers they are they are the most affected people by that and according to the quantitative survey the same kind of survey but carried out in Villa Mavice they're also more exposed to persecution and they feel pressure and burden related to language survival and this is reflected in their self-assessed health the poorer health I mean they feel that I mean we can see that Yustina has found the relationship between between this engagement in language revitalization and poorer self-rated health but even so they report that the heritage language is a tool for healing and improving their well-being but this is as you can understand it's an ambiguous situation it's a situation that you have to take into account when planning language revitalization and cultural revitalization activities in highly traumatized communities that are still object of ethnic discrimination even if it's not overt even if it's more covered also in state policies so these results may significantly inform more sensitive and more effective language revitalization strategies and what is clear here is that we deal with some something that people working in language evolution would say these are these adaptive responses and they go against the principle of utility maximization because these people should really adopt the majority language they should abandon languages that don't to perish but they are not doing this so these are apparent on the above I mean what I want to stress from my perspective they are apparent anomalies with the language choice model the rational language choice model and minority groups are quoting Latin sometimes resist assimilation and refuse to disappear from the historical stage as the Vilamovians and a very salient case from our research comes from the Kashubian case study Kashub's live in northern Poland northwestern Poland and they have been in 2005 the language has been recognized as a regional language although they are not recognized as an ethnic minority and in the beginning of the project we carried out a survey at the linguistic vitality survey in this region thanks to the collaboration with Kashubian activists and this is published in plus one here you can see that the title of this from discouragement to self empowerment and we found out that up to 61 participants admitted that at some point at some point in their lives they had been discouraged from speaking the language the heritage language Kashubian and to up to 63 percent this had happened very often and 70 percent in 2018 were still convinced that some institutions advocated against speaking Kashubian so the discrimination is ongoing even if many individuals and institutions deny that and in this collaborative paper we found out this this path that actually people because we first noticed that there's an associated between experienced discouragement and enhanced language used which was kind of like not very logical right you will get discouraged and they use the language more often but we found out that positive emotions are again a driver a driving force in this process because they mediate between the experience of discrimination people who are discriminated who are discouraged to use the language developed against rejecting this suppression they developed a positive emotional attachment to their language and they in the consequence they use the language more often now and we have to say that this is not representative for the whole Kashubian community because people who participated in the survey probably were people because it was announced through Kashubian media so these were more active and more engaged individuals who care about the language and are interested in supporting and continuing their identity for more active individuals this is the path the self empowerment path path that can overcome the experience of discouragement discrimination and they decided to use the language more often thanks to the positive emotional attachment to the language and we think that the similar situation might be with the Silesians who are the biggest over 500 000 speakers of the language unrecognized the biggest unrecognized ethnic minority in Poland and who fighting for years to have their language recognized and in vain so far but hopefully it will be recognized in the in the near future and there is this quote from from a Silesian writer Sztupan Fardov translated English there is some perverse way in which every bit of contempt and scorn shown by Poland towards Silesians makes me happy for each such act there is a person somewhere out there who decides to go against and to nurture their Silesianess but the reason I mentioned in the Silesian Silesians here is that they have been most harshly affected during the covid pandemic because of the outbreaks of of disease in their migrations and they were more or more tested so Silesia has been stigmatized during the pandemic they were it was called a second Lombardia so come to second Lombardia in Poland and there were a lot of hostilities against people coming from Silesia or from first Silesians who were blamed for for spreading the the the pandemic in Poland and since both of them the Silesians and the Kashyos were historically traumatized during the war period and after the war they were heavily persecuted including post-war concentration camps for Silesian or first assimilation of children both in Silesia and the Kashubia they shared the sense of historical trauma also unrecognized and also the people of Mexico carrying the sense of historical trauma we decided to to look at the possible mechanism retraumatization mechanism during the pandemic for people who felt discriminated against as ethnic minorities during the during the the pandemic so we had this variable based on a number of questions assessing covid-19 related discrimination if they were stigmatized, shouldn't be against or had worse access for example to health facilities we looked at the historical trauma availability the the tools were adapted to the historical experience of each group and the symptoms of this trauma psychological symptoms and we also measure general anxiety disorder this study was performed online during the pandemic in in Poland in Mexico and later in in Italy between June 2020 and January 2021 so the first phase of the pandemic so this was the model and indeed we found out and these were various statistical analysis performed by by Katarzyna Lubiewska across the three groups and indeed the mechanism was was significant in a way that you can see the Kashubian group so people who were discriminated during the pandemic had a higher level of general anxiety disorder which is a medical condition is a medical scale that we used but this was also mediated by their sort of reactivation of the sense of historical trauma so this is a mechanism that explains a phenomenon across observed across the world that indigenous people were more vulnerable to covid not only because of economic you know economic conditions but also they were already the groups that are already traumatized are more often retraumatized and more strongly retraumatized during such disasters and crisis as the pandemic and the results were even stronger for the Silesians and indigenous people in Mexico because there was no actually when we looked when we included historical trauma into the model there was no significant direct effect between discrimination covid discrimination and and the general anxiety disorder it only works through the trauma path so this has confirmed the mechanism of retraumatization of indigenous people and i think minors during the pandemic which obviously also has impact and implications for working with these groups in the post-pandemic world but when looking at these results we also we have also been able this is mainly the work by Bartek Romig in collaboration with me and Johanna Mareña we also look at the possible language period in the pandemic and we found out that one of the predictors in the regression analysis that reduced that the general anxiety disorder among the Silesian and Kashubians was the active use of the heritage languages it was a negative predictor of God of general anxiety disorder and it referred to languages across different domains of life but this model was significant only when the impact of historical trauma was taken to account so we cannot forget about this so concluding going to the conclusions i would say that speakers of minority and regional languages help us question some simplistic theories about linguistic culture revolution social economic advancement and optimal acculturation strategies what are really optimal acculturation strategies because among acculturation strategies we have a more positive integration that that is based on the retention of local identity culture and the language and we have a simulation that means abandonment is another strategy that's negative from our point of view that means that you have to abandon your ethnic identity and your language and merge with the dominant society it might not be it is not an optimal way for local communities to go because of the cost long-term costs and effects they have to pay so the speakers actually of this community help us overcome the limits of what is bound to rationality it doesn't take into account this broader picture and one of the mechanisms that can one of the mechanisms that we propose in this team project to consider is the ethno-linguistic cure obviously our point of departure was a social cure but the social cure doesn't really look at the role of the language and when we when i when i speak about ethno-linguistic cure i'm not speaking only about the language i'm talking about the whole world of relationships in which the local languages are embedded and this includes local networks of support of support that are vital that are crucial for the sense of amic well-being they are how the how the languages connect to local economy traditional knowledge interactions with the environment usage of the resources all of this all this universe where the language of which the language is is a vital part and our research shows that even if it's embedded in this relationship when we just look at the language use using quantitative and qualitative data we can account for its beneficial role for speakers of endangered languages so this is this vital element that doesn't act alone it needs friendly environment both inside community and outside the community but it is a vital part of this of this beneficial mechanism this is this is the point i would like to make and in the end i would like to include the long list of contributors to this research because as i said this is not an individual research it's a collective research that embraces resources from different disciplines and also researchers from local communities and community based experts who are behind the creation of our tools carrying out the results and also interpretation of these results so this is very important point that i want to make thank you for your attention i'll just thank you so people on zoom can hear me we'll start with questions if anyone in the room has a question or something like this here you can discuss further okay so are there any here in the room i'm gonna question later there are some some awesome questions on the chat oh there's a lot i wasn't able to follow this good so um jenathan if you've got your hand raised why don't we go with you if you want to unmute yourself and ask a question yeah now thank you very much joey and thank you professor olko that was an extremely stimulating and interesting paper a huge amount of data to get one's head around so forgive me if i misunderstood some of what you were communicating so um you were saying at one point which is undeniably true right that well-being as understood in western context don't seem to align with indigenous understandings of well-being which differs from community to community which i'd agree with but it seems to me that we should want to know as you say you know how this language well-being connection operates and i suppose one way of doing that would be to see how generalizable it is so one question would be you know how how best to do that uh to see if the connection holds outside of say you know north america or australia so relatedly you also seem to rely heavily on subjective well-being measures in your in some of the studies you cited but you also quoted objective well-being measures cited by scholars in canada early on in the paper for example but you seem to be more skeptical about those so i suppose i'm i'm trying to sort of bridge those two things right how can we generalize if we're interested in the cognitive social psychological dimensions to language and well-being and while at the same time adopting this thisemic approach which undeniably is incredibly important okay um first camera exactly yeah okay it's very difficult because i cannot look at the people who are asking questions yeah so um maybe i cannot move because they want people right yeah so i'm very skeptical about using so-called objective measures of well-being what would that be economic indices we know they don't work because in australia and also in our communities the committee is collaborating with us in mexico according to the general economic criteria they're much poorer than the rest of the society but nevertheless they report high levels of happiness okay it doesn't work that way what i what i think is a possible solution is always to study first how local people conceive their sense of happiness and good life and what are the factors and the criteria and then you can construct a meaningful tool that has to be cultural sensitive it cannot be used for for everybody but also you have some general psychological tools like the scale we use for satisfaction with life scale and we had a lot of um concern if because it it taps individual sense of psychological well-being and we know that the collective dimension is important for a lot of communities so we didn't know if it's going to work but it worked actually in the sense that it reflected it had a different level of of well-being so i think if you use different tools one that's amic and the other that's possibly etic or you can you can also adopt this external tool modified to fit your situation the main thing then you can really hope for achieving some reliable results but i think an important part is to always contextualize quantitative results before launching any survey and after having receiving the outcomes with a local expert really to contextualize what kind of sense these results make in the community how we should really understand them so this is something that we it's one of our conclusion that's that's important to have community involved both in the design of research creation of tools and carrying out the research in cultural sensitive ways uh so that because some questions can traumatize the community so if you have outsiders coming to the community you know they can traumatize these people even more and we all also become aware of this in our in our in our project um and you you just need local researchers to be partners on the project and also even if we have quantitative results when i or other people presented this to our experts from communities and we discussed them what this really means we got another level of understanding how to how to how to understand and interpret these results so i think testing some universal tools is okay but you have to be aware they might not work but elaborating cultural sensitive tools is a way to go and only after that you can you can you can you can perceive some commonalities between communities and not anticipate that these commonalities must happen and they you know impose this this this press positions uh what the the sense of happiness happiness is right based on our western criteria or based on research in other indigenous communities so this i hope i answer as i answered your question lots of food for full thank you very much thank you welcome to more questions i see saligo mucuña has his camera on and his work was cited early in the papers i don't know if you have a question or something but you'll have it on yes first of all i'd like to thank justina for the thought-provoking presentation and covering so many different parts of the world to prove her point but i'd like to also make a correction and invoking socioeconomic structure is not in order to speak of economic advancement is in order to speak of economic competitiveness of economic survival when in the case of Mexico for instance the colonizers have changed the socioeconomic structure that puts the indigenous people under a lot of pressure to adapt to the changes and people can adapt to the changes in many different ways and when people for instance choose to speak Spanish in order to participate in the new socioeconomic world order it's not necessarily because they want to advance to the top of the system or whatever the for them is a matter of sustainability compared to a traditional indigenous socioeconomic structure that has been destroyed so this is something quite realistic for them and the your surveys seem impressive but my reaction is that they are also one sided because you have focused in the case of Mexico you have focused on the populations that continue to speak now at all but you haven't told us about the people that have shifted to Spanish on the one hand people that are successful in the new socioeconomic structure what is your assessment or what would be your assessment of well-being the people that have shifted to Spanish but are not so successful what would be your assessment of the welfare of the well-being and this is a kind of rejoinder to Jonathan's comment and what are the determinants of well-being it would really be interesting if you had involved some psychologists working with you that may give you the criteria or the perception of the subjects well-being so there's a side of the story that is missing here as impressive as your statistics are you know there are questions that remain unanswered and if we go in the style of David Layton the people react to these new challenges in different ways in which we have tended to generalize other populations but without really discriminating among individuals because people have the individual responses whatever we can generalize over a population we have to remember that the population as such is a construct the Asians are individuals and we have to pay attention to these things so I think that there is you know there are your conclusions remain question-building although they are really and I must underscore this they are directing us toward interacting more with specific individuals and finding out how this year thank you I'm sorry I couldn't hear well the last part the last part is that your conclusions although I found them question begging they are stimulating and they are in encouraging us to pay attention to the behaviors of individuals before we can extrapolate to the level of populations okay yes so the professor move on and thank you very much for this very very rich comments and regarding the evolution yes I fully agree with this observation that actually due to the the forces of the of the market local and global economies and how local economies are embedded in global economies obviously this there's a strong pressure on speakers of and regional languages local languages to to to assimilate and it's a very complex complex phenomenon it's universal it's universal what I was what I was what I was trying to say that this comes with a cost and this this was what I was what I was saying and also in in terms of in the social political reality in which we are embedded we sometimes here I myself heard this with regard to to members of ethnic minorities in Poland if they feel discriminated against where they don't abandon speaking the languages is the most easy part just you know let them do that and they will there will be no reason anymore to discriminate against them right so many people opt for this for this road and nevertheless the the cost that they pay is high I'm not saying this happens in every single case and you're right that it would be extremely interesting to have a study group for people who originated in these communities and no longer speak the language we hadn't done it it was not the purpose of our project but I think it would really complement this kind of research to have this this perspective you you are talking about we did include people who don't speak indigenous or ethnic minority languages anymore in our in our study we did include them so the general effects were calculated not on the basis if we have speakers of the language but our criteria from the criterion for including this participants was if they declared belonging to this ethnic minority if they feel indigenous or if they feel Silesian if they feel Vilamovian and if they feel you know any of these groups and actually most of our participants in Vilamowice did not speak the language they assimilated to the to the to the Polish language so we actually they felt we observe the impact on health the sharing of trauma and so on is on people in a huge degree on people who no longer use the language we did not make a separate group in our analysis for those who speak and those who don't speak we can actually run analysis like that and I think it's a very good idea to see to see that yes and regarding the representativeness of this this I want to emphasize that our research was not on a representative samples it would be impossible given the nature the size of these communities also and maybe it was representatives for for for Vilamovians because we had 300 participants and the communities of several thousand people so it's a huge huge part of it but for other for other case studies we could not physically make personal in-person questionnaires with representatives number of people so obviously the results are statistically significant but we do not extrapolate them and I said it very clearly with the cashews we do not extrapolate or generalize these results for the for the for the whole community and we did compare some results for in the covid survey for people who identified as minorities and those who don't and we found out some interesting differences and we found the differences actually across all our groups so in Poland for different minorities in Poland to give you just one example and for people in Mexico indigenous people in Mexico and we embrace many indigenous groups and also non-indigenous participants who who feel the survey we found out that people who are indigenous or minority had a much higher level of protected behaviors during the pandemic than the general population which shows you that people of these minorities are more self-protecting probably because they were not just thinking about their individual lives but also the the endangered status of their communities so they they protected again themselves against covid much stronger and this is statistically significant for Polish minorities and for Mexico and we compare this we were able to compare it with the outlook and I agree that if we could do more comparisons like that obviously it would bring a very very interesting and more complete picture of what we are looking at just a significant amount of other questions we have Julia Salami here with us so as the question okay thank you very much Christina that was really interesting I was wondering if you have any plans for making use of this information for practical purposes with communities yes yes uh was one of the purposes of this project and we actually prepared along with community members this has focused so far on the ethnic minorities in Poland we prepared a practically oriented publication in five languages Polish and for other local languages in Poland it's called minorities and their languages during the pandemic anti-stigma package and this basically shows the ways in which ethnic minorities are stigmatized or discriminated against for that the possible solutions to that strategies to counteract it and also how the use of the language can help in different domains of life so this is this is actually ready and it's in actually in press now and we will be distributing this these packages to the communities activists NGOs and also policymakers to make them aware of the the effects of and the scale of I think discrimination in Poland and a similar package is being developed for Ukrainian immigrants and it's it's actually this work coordinated by our Ukrainian expert and we are she's including also the the the current context of of the refugees because you know we can imagine for example one problem is the admitting this this this stance of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children in Polish schools and basically they are treated as indigenous to the Mexico there are some introductory classes to make them more familiar with Polish and then transition them to Polish entirely and have them make a school in Polish so this is the the current model and you can you can you can imagine what kind of impact it has on this children which already carry war trauma and then they they have to be schooled in a foreign language right away so there are so many challenges and we want to also share this this this this knowledge and also possible share possible suggestions for solutions how to how to deal with this this real challenges that are affecting minority and immigrant children right now so there's one more question that I'm sorry professor literacy yes there's a quick question for me I would be asking if your research took into account whether the language is using written or yes one of our skills was to assess self-assess language proficiency so we had separate questions tapping oral skills and writing skills yes so we've also looked at this and we found it in most cases to be of little utility really because very good speakers very often they have very low level of self-declared literacy confidence okay so it wouldn't really tell us very much about the vitality of the language so in fact we did not include we have this data but so far we haven't included this in any analysis because I was very confusing so so the question so maybe with this question and of course if you want to continue the discussion longer than anything other for a minute what is this yes I just wanted to highlight the fact that your presentation really makes obvious something that we should be paying more attention to that language endangerment does not come alone that language endangerment comes with a number of changes in society and actually in the approach that I have adopted like treat language as technology for communication and you put it in a number of other cultural phenomena then you must notice for instance that the healthcare system has changed that the what religious system has changed and so and while we are worried about language endangerment a logical question is shouldn't we be worrying about these other cultural changes for the population and in the cases of interventions that you have cited what appears to be obvious to me is that that there is a complexity of things going on for instance in the case of immigrants dealing with COVID and so forth it's not just health issues it's other questions regarding the insertion in the host population and so forth and the kind of isolation that there may be experience all these things come together so if a person comes to you and speaks to you in a language that you are familiar with it's not necessarily for the purpose of preserving or maintaining the language it is also for the purpose of establishing some special connection so that other issues can be dealt with and also speaking communicating with people in a language that they understand better than the alternative that is another factor so I think that when we focus on global aspects of language endangerment it's the local global aspects of language endangerment that should really receive priority over the worldwide global aspects of language endangerment which for me are fiction thank you thank you very much thank you very much for this comment yeah and I think that it's very difficult actually to find a balance approach to accepting the overarching unstoppable change in you know religious practices economy social structure and finding the current place of local languages into changing social structures and economies but also try to value and protect traditional knowledge that's behind this this community and that for example it's so crucial for stopping adverse climatic change or for managing the resources I think this is the challenge for the community should work out finding the balance between the change and retaining this kind of knowledge that can still be applied even to these conditions that are under a very dynamic change so this is a secure challenge and where the local languages step in what's their current role because obviously we cannot go to the past and it has to be adapted to these new conditions and I don't think there's a universal recipe for this a universal approach to that this has to be a sensitive to local conditions and to what the community wants I think this this this will of the community and their own vision I think it's it's something that has to be taken into account in the first place thank you for your presence and your comments and and the question thank you so much