Примењена лингвистика у част Ранку Бугарском - Језик у

JEZIK U UPOTREBI / LANGUAGE IN USE
identified by their inherent, implicit positive social roles within communities of
practice, influence the language behavior of all other members of the community,
without imposing it as the only acceptable or correct language behavior.
I will try to provide an illustration of the above described model of de
facto language policy and planning in the area of gender sensitive language use,
which has until recently never been a topic of discussion among official language
managers within academic and state institutions. Therefore, gender sensitive language
policy and planning has for decades been carried out through language
use among interested communities of practice through a process which might be
called language harmonization, in which alternative language forms and structures
emerge and their possible suitability for standardization is evaluated in real
life language use first within a given community of practice and then within larger
strata of the society (Filipović 2009b: 120).
For instance, we can focus on the use of gender sensitive nouns and pronouns
in educated discourse in Australian English and in Serbian. Powels (2003)
compares the use or gender neutral forms of nouns and pronouns in Australian
English in time intervals which she defines as the pre-feminist reform period
(1960s and 1970s) and the post-feminist reform period (1990s) in public spontaneous
(non-scripted) oral discourse (radio and TV shows, parliamentary debates,
etc.). Her research shows that the use of masculine nouns and pronouns as generic
and gender-inclusive in Australian public discourse has dropped from 95% in the
pre-feminist reform period to 18% in the last decade of the 20 th century. Powels
indicates that the reform and corresponding changes in language behavior have
been carried out by women within interested communities of practice, while the
adaptation in speech practices within this speech community at large represent a
result of the overall change in language ideologies and heightened consciousness
of men and women alike about the discriminatory nature of use of gender insensitive
morphological forms (Powels 2003: 567).
From the above recount, the conclusion can be drawn that the Australian
culture has already implemented certain aspects of gender sensitive language
planning based on emergent language behavior of interested communities of
practice, which has already found its place within the corpus of standard Australian
English. In Serbia, however, the situation is rather different. Gender sensitive
language practices of interested communities of practice in this country are
still very ‘invisible’ to the general public and often a topic of heated debates and
negative stereotypes both in the academic circles and in the general public. One
small step forward 7 in this area is gender sensitive differentiation of academic
7 In accordance with the interpretation of scientific truth presented in the previous sections, I evaluate
this language behavior as positive. In a way, it represents a come-back of the pre-World War II
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