Before I adopted my daughter, I decided that I would help my daughter retain her native language. This would allow her a connection to her culture. And later in life it could be useful for school, employment and traveling.

My daughter, 5 years after her adoption, can count to 10 in Russian. She has a very limited vocabulary.

la-la - doll
da - yes
nyet - no
babushka - grandma

Here is what happened....

Children under 12 years will probably lose their Russian/Ukrainian language skills unless they have one person in their life that uses nothing but Russian/Ukrainian with them.

Children 12 years or older have a much better chance of retaining their first language.

Depending on the area of Ukraine you could adopt a child that is bilingual. My daughter sort of was. She used both the Russian and Ukrainian languages. She used the languages mushed together. This greatly confused my translator for a couple of days. Eventually my translator discovered my daughter was more responsive to Ukrainian.

My daughter's orphanage was in a small village outside of Kharkiv. It appears that her primary care givers from this village used Ukrainian. However about 80% of people in Kharkiv Oblast use Russian as their primary language.

Children adopted from Ukraine could speak Russian, Ukrainian or Polish as their primary language.

For a child younger then 12 years of age...

Most of a child's vocabulary will be moved over to English after 4 months. The child typically uses the Russian language structure with English words. Example of this is........

- verbs at the end of sentences
- no pronouns

After being home for 4 months, my daughter refused to let me use Russian and Ukrainian words around her. She would correct me and tell me "Mama no sabaka, dog".

From 4 to 9 months, the child works on switching from the Russian language structure to the English language structure. My daughter had this done after being home 6 months.

My daughter resisted retaining her Ukrainian and Russian language. We spoke English at home. The kids at preschool spoke English. She wanted to speak English. She seemed to associate Russian with the orphanage.

After being home for 6 months, Natasha also told me that she was afraid.... Afraid that someone would take her back to the orphanage. And if someone spoke Russian she thought they might be a bad person who was going to take her back to the orphanage.

My poor darling had so many fears. I stopped focusing on her retaining Russian and Ukrainian languages.