Belarusian Studies Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The language situation in contemporary Belarus is characterized not only by mass Belarusian-Russian bilingualism among the minority Belarusian-speaking segment of the population, but also by a significant division within the Belarusophone community in attitudes toward the literary norm: those whose usage is oriented toward the post-1933 standard (the only form of standard Belarusian officially recognized by the Belarusian government), and those, typically allied with the pro-western anti-Lukashenka opposition, who seek to distance themselves from what they regard as the overly russified language used in the official Belarusian-language media and state educational system.
In this paper I examine the language usage and language attitudes of a numerically small but potentially quite influential segment of contemporary Belarusian society: Belarusophone university students. Employing the “community of practice” model developed by Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998), and applied in sociolinguistics by researchers such as Eckert (2000), I show that although there is a considerable range of variation in Belarusophone students’ usage of and attitudes toward the competing variants of standard Belarusian, this variation, when we take into account the students’ participation in specific forms of social engagement, is in many cases entirely predictable and regular. As defined by Wenger (1998), a community of practice is “an aggregate of individuals engaged in negotiating and learning practices that contribute to achieving a common goal.” The community of practice can be defined, and defines itself, with respect to three parameters: 1) what it is “about,” that is, the community's joint enterprise as it is understood and continually renegotiated by its members; 2) how it functions, i.e. the forms of mutual engagement and joint action that bind members together into a cohesive social entity; and 3) the capabilities it has produced, i.e. a shared repertoire of resources (practices, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, discourses, styles, etc.) that members have developed as part of a process of social learning. The concept of “community of practice” provides a more empirically satisfying model of social structure in complex, more mobile modern urban societies than the social network concept employed by sociolinguists such as Milroy (1980), since it focuses more on the content of social interactions, that is, what social networks are “about,” rather than simply keeping track of “who knows whom and in what capacity.”
On the basis of an e-mail survey of 70 Belarusophone students at universities in Belarus conducted in 2004-2005, I sought to test the hypothesis that the most active participants in what I call “oppositional communities of practice” are leading the way in the use of non-codified, innovative forms associated with the independent pro-western Belarusian-language media and younger Belarusophone intelligentsia. The oppositional communities of practice that were the focus of this study included the Association of Belarusian Students (ZBS), Malady Front and similar oppositional organizations, as well as fans of Belarusian-language rock groups (the “Belarusian sound community,” as Survilla (2002) has called them), all groups which define themselves in opposition to the Russocentric and neo-Soviet official Belarusian culture.
The survey included a linguistic questionnaire focusing on variants in the phonological shape of loanwords (e.g. codified standard [plan] ‘plan’ ~ [pl’an]), variants in inflectional and derivational morphology (e.g. hetaha horada ~ hetaha horadu ‘this city (gen. sg.)’, šmat moŭ~ šmat movaŭ ‘many languages’ (gen. pl.), samy tanny bilet ~ najtannejšy bilet ~ najtanny bilet ‘the cheapest ticket’, maladzjožny ~ moladzevy ‘youth’ (adj.) and a number of morphosyntactic and syntactic variables (e.g. kamitet pa spravax moladzi ~ kamitet u spravakh moladzi ‘youth affairs committee’), užyvaemaja zaraz stratehija ~ stratehija, jakaja zaraz užyvaecca ~ užyvanaja zaraz stratehija ‘the strategy currently being employed’, heta novy šljax ~ heta josc' novym šljaxam ‘this is a new way’. Respondents were asked to grade these variants according to the following scale: 1) the variant the respondent uses him or herself and which he/she considers to be correct; 2) an acceptable variant within the standard language; 3) a form that is used by other people, but which the respondent considers to be incorrect; 4) a form that the respondent considers to be impossible in Belarusian.
Respondents were also asked to answer a series of questions concerning their family's language use, language use in different domains, whether or not the respondents’ friendship networks include primarily Belarusian or Russian speakers, degree of exposure to Belarusian-language print and electronic media employing both the official standard and non-codified literary variants associated with the opposition media, degree of participation in Belarusian youth organizations (official vs. oppositional), exposure to Belarusian-language rock music, knowledge of Slavic languages other than Belarusian and Russian, and so on. In addition, I included a series of questions focusing on respondents’ attitudes regarding language and ethnicity and their views as to which nations/ethnic groups are culturally and psychologically closest to the Belarusians (this latter question was included to determine which external reference groups Belarusian students tend to identify with most).
For each informant, I calculated an index based on level of participation in oppositional communities of practice and commitment to the core values of the nationalist opposition (i.e. tendency to consider language an essential marker of national identity, tendency to view Belarusians as more like Central or West Europeans than the Russians). I then divided the responses into three groups: those with the highest scores for participation in oppositional communities of practice and oppositional values, those with average scores, and those with the lowest scores. I then produced aggregate scores for each of the linguistic variables for each of the three groups.
Analysis of the data shows that, as I hypothesized, the students with the highest scores for “oppositionality” show the strongest preference for innovative forms, while those with the lowest scores adhere more closely to the norms of the post-1933 codified standard (forms that are also, for the most part, linguistically closer to Russian). Those with average scores for oppositionality show the highest degree of variation, in some cases preferring the innovative variants, and in other cases remaining more conservative. Another interesting finding is that the individuals occupying the most extreme positions on the continuum of oppositionality show the most extreme evaluations of the competing variants: a higher percentage of those with high oppositionality indices regard the post-1933 standard variants as “incorrect” or “non-Belarusian,” while those with the lowest oppositionality scores show the strongest tendency to characterize the non-codified variants in the same way.
Belarusian language use among Belarusian university students thus represents a continuum, from the “hard core,” consciously Belarusian-dominant speakers, who use the language in all or most social contexts and whose language use is intimately tied to specific oppositional practices and discourses, to the Russian-dominant “casual users,” among whom there is a relatively low level of commitment to the use of Belarusian as an overt political and cultural statement. The “in-betweens,” whose language, though influenced to some extent by the recent innovations in literary usage, reflects the continued influence of the Soviet-era codified standard, show sympathy for oppositional cultural models as reflected in their patterns of media consumption, but are not full participants in the associated communities of practice.
While traditional variationist sociolinguistics tends to disregard speakers’ conscious manipulation of linguistic variables as representing a less authentic, less natural form of language, in studying Belarusophone student subcultures specifically as communities of practice, we must be sensitive to the role the innovative variants play in the affirmation of group membership and status within the group, that is, their function as a form of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1991). Viewed at the level of individual language use, such variation also plays a key role in the expression of individual positionality, or stancetaking, which has recently emerged as a central concern in research in interactional sociolinguistics (Jaffe 2009). As argued by Coulmas (2005), a focus on speaker agency, as expressed in the socially-motivated choices that speakers make from the linguistic options available to them, helps to shed new light on the problems of language variation and change that are at the heart of the sociolinguistic enterprise.

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