Biography
Nataliia Kovtun studied Slavic Studies at the University Ivan Franko in Lviv (Ukraine). Her focus lied on Czech and Ukrainian language and literature and English philology. Between 2011 and 2012, she was a Visegrad Fund-scholar at the Charles University in Prague. From 2013 to 2018 she worked as an assistant and later as a lecturer at the chair in Slavic Philology at the University Ivan Frank in Lviv. Furthermore, she worked as a coordinator and lecturer of Czech at the Czech Centre in Lviv. In 2016, she obtained her PhD at the University of Lviv (thesis on the neologisms of the Czech sociopolitical vocabulary between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21th century).
After moving to Switzerland, she worked as a teacher at the Ukrainian School in Basel Barvinok from 2020 until 2022. Between 2022 and 2023, she taught German as a foreign language at the PS Gellert in Basel. Sine 2020, she has been a interpreter at the Department of Education of Basel.
As of August 2023, Nataliia Kovtun is a lecturer of Slavic Philology with a focus on Ukrainian at the Institute of Slavic Languages and Literatures of the University of Bern.
Fields of interest: linguistic dynamics, plurilingualism and identity, language use, code-switching, Ukrainian as a foreign language.