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Communities of Practice and the Linguistic Construction of Difference:
Divergent Innovation among Belarusophone Students
Curt Woolhiser (Harvard University)
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
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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 Belarusianlanguage 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.
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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 noncodified 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 Russiandominant “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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