"A Language Expert Protects True Values and National Interests": A Look into the Construction of Linguistic Expertise in the Metalinguistic Discourses in Lithuania and Serbia

Abstract

Linguists, language teachers and all other types of language experts are of key importance in the dissemination of beliefs about language, today referred to in literature as language ideologies (Rumsey, 1990). In spite of the great deal of attention given to language experts in sociolinguistic literature, very little research has looked into how these experts and their expertise is perceived amongst non - experts. A study of the perception of experts would help answer the question of how language ideologies c ome about, how are they formed by non - experts and are there any competing language ideologies, that language users come up with themselves. The aim of this paper is, thus, to explore the discursive construction of language experts amongst lay language user s. The data is drawn from online comment sections, and two communities are compared: Lithuania and Serbia. The research is qualitative, based on a relatively small number of comments, with the main goal to identify tendencies which could be examined in fur ther research. The analytical tools build upon the notion of interdiscursivity . Following Bauman (2005) is assumed that every utterance (or here: a comment) is created ideologically, by relying on recognisable ways of speaking, voicing and answering to discourses circulating in society. Such an analysis of the possible connections o f this discourse with other discourses could offer some explanation how language ideologies coming from language experts are perpetuated, negotiated or reconstructed.