Prerequisites for the emergence of communicative barriers in the acquisition of the Croatian language by Ukrainians (using the example of an adult audience)

Abstract

The article examines the prerequisites for the emergence of communication barriers, which are obstacles in communication that forcibly displaced persons from Ukraine who found themselves on the territory of Croatia encounter in the Croatian language learning. The study was conducted by observing of six groups of Ukrainian citizens who attended the Croatian language course during 2023 –2025 at the primary and intermediate levels.

Successful integration of migrants into the local community involves employment and ensuring an adequate standard of living, a key prerequisite for which is mastering the language of the country. Despite the fact that Ukraine and Croatia belong to the same Slavic linguistic and cultural space, mastering the Croatian language poses many challenges for many Ukrainians to the same extent as the process of social adaptation.

Four primary factors that influence the emergence of communicative barriers in the communication of Ukrainians in Croatian are analyzed: age, educational and professional, knowledge of other languages, and the close relationship of the Ukrainian and Croatian languages. During the observation, we discover that each of the analyzed factors has an equally positive and negative impact on the process of learning the language. On the one hand, a higher level of education of the speaker and his/her proficiency in other foreign languages contributes to faster and more effective mastery of the Croatian language, but we often encounter phenomena opposite to what is expected. Thus, a wide vocabulary of the native language hinders the speaker in building elementary speech structures in a foreign language. In the same way, knowledge of other foreign languages forces the speaker to rely on previously acquired speech experience and is manifested in a slowdown in the production of new language structures. Interestingly, bilingual Ukrainians with dominant Russian have a much harder time mastering Croatian than those whose dominant language is Ukrainian, which can be recorded at different stages of language learning and at different language levels. Here, perhaps the key factor in the emergence of communicative barriers is the fact of the close relationship of the languages that are in focus, which is caused by the discrepancy between the level of understanding and the level of production of language structures.

Understanding the prerequisites for the emergence of communicative barriers is a necessary component in choosing a strategy for building a foreign language teaching, which, among other things, is one of the key factors for successful social adaptation and integration of migrants in crisis situations. At the same time, the primary task of a foreign language teacher is to promote the development of both linguistic and cultural competence.