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e roles of eld and capital in negotiating
language policy in the Slovene parliament
Kristof Savski
Prince of Songkla University
e aim of this paper is to demonstrate the potential of integrating Bourdieu’s
notions of eld and capital in discursive analyses of language policy. e paper
presents an analysis of a debate in a committee session of the Slovene parlia-
ment, where dierent actors negotiated about the contents of a language policy
strategy. e study draws on nexus analysis by focussing on the situated nature
of discursive actions in particular settings, and presents a historical ethnography
which combines analysis of transcripts with interviews and a detailed examina-
tion of policy documents. e analysis uncovers the eorts of actors to legitimize
their authority and achieve their goals with the support of capital accumulated in
dierent elds, and focusses particularly on the dynamics involved in translating
the value of sources of capital across the borders of dierent elds.
Keywords: language policy, parliamentary discourse, eld, capital
. Introduction
Several recent studies have been devoted to the study of language policy from a dis-
cursive perspective, highlighting particularly the complex nature of this process at
dierent levels of politics and society (see e.g. Savski 2016; Johnson 2011; Källkvist
and Hult 2016; Koller and Davidson 2008; Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2011; Unger
2013). Fundamentally, what joins these approaches is a belief “that language policy
is a multi-layered phenomenon that is constituted and enacted in and through
discourse” (Barakos and Unger 2016, 1). Following various approaches to critical
discourse studies (e.g. Wodak and Meyer 2015), a central theme of these studies
has been uncovering the ways in which ideology impacts policymaking, and how
its inuence reproduces social inequalities.
is paper aims to stretch discourse analyses into a complementary direc-
tion, by examining how dierent social elds inuence policies. While central to
Journal of Language and Politics : (), –. ./jlp..sav
– / - – © John Benjamins Publishing Company
Field and capital in negotiating language policy
the theorisation and operationalisation of various approaches in critical discourse
analysis (e.g. Reisigl and Wodak 2015), particularly in relation to genre (e.g. Van
Leeuwen 1993), the concept of eld has seen comparatively little direct applica-
tion in analyses of dierent kinds of discourses (cf. Craig 2013; Fairclough 1994;
Forchtner and Schneickert 2016; Krzyżanowski 2013; 2014; Unger 2013), particu-
larly as developed in the works of Bourdieu (e.g. 1993). Similarly, there has been
little use of the concept of capital (Bourdieu 1984) when describing dierent pow-
er dynamics within the elds that are analysed (implicitly or explicitly).
My argument in this paper is that integrating Bourdieu’s concepts of eld and
capital into discursive analyses of various types has the potential to shed new light
on phenomena that such studies observe as a matter of routine. is is particularly
true of discursive analyses of multifaceted phenomena like language policy, which
by design bring together actors from dierent elds, like academia, education,
politics, public administration, etc. In order to formulate language policies, actors
must rst reconcile the dierent ‘ways of thinking’ about specic issues that their
socialisation into a very disparate set of elds entrenches. Additionally, they must
be able to venture outside of ‘their’ elds and negotiate potentially challenging new
situations in which they must adapt to new types of practices, and must nd ways
to draw power from dierent types of capital from dierent elds.
e purpose of this paper is to analyse how eld and capital inuenced a lan-
guage policy debate in the Slovene parliament. Specically, the paper analyses
how the parliamentary deputies and members of the public present at the session
drew on dierent forms of capital accumulated in dierent elds in order to con-
struct their authority in the debate. e analysis also examines they ways in which
this capital inuenced the decision-making process by focussing on a particular
amendment which was formulated during the session itself, through a compro-
mise between two interested stakeholders.
. Policy as an intersection of social spaces
Policies are complex subjects for analysis: on the one hand, they are an inher-
ently textual phenomenon, while on the other, they are sites where various social
practices and spaces come into contact with each other. As a text, a policy codies
particular courses of action, allocates means to achieve goals, and legitimates them
through a particular construction of social reality (Levinson et al. 2009; Savski
2017; see also Jenkins 2007). But policies are much more than texts: the words that
they include are products of negotiation (Savski 2017; Källkvist and Hult 2016;
Wodak 2000), and any such negotiation is governed by various factors. In this
paper, I examine policy negotiation from the perspective of social space, that is,
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Kristof Savski
depending on what elds policy debates relate to, and what nexuses of practice
they occur in.
On the macro-level, Bourdieu described society as composed of elds. As he
writes, elds are sites of contention between forces in that they contain particu-
lar distributions of capital (or power), but they are also sites of constant struggle
to change this status quo and redistribute capital (Bourdieu 1993, 30). Fields are
centred on a particular activity and have, through their development, acquired a
particular amount of autonomy within society, reected in the existence of eld-
specic markers of achievement– means of acquiring capital (Maton 2005). In
sum, a eld is a “relatively autonomous domain of activity that responds to rules
of functioning and institutions that are specic to it and which dene the relations
among the agents” (Mangez and Hilgers 2014, 5).
To describe the distribution of power within a eld, Bourdieu speaks of three
types of capital (Bourdieu 1986). Along with economic capital, which relates purely
to the distribution of assets that may easily be converted into money, Bourdieu
also nds that two other forms of capital are crucial determiners of power rela-
tions within elds. Cultural capital is accumulated through access to privileged
forms of knowledge or skill, either through explicit schooling or implicit learn-
ing, which can in some cases also be converted to money (e.g. by considering the
amount of money invested in acquiring a particular skill). Under cultural capital,
Bourdieu also includes ways of institutionally recognising acquired knowledge,
such as diplomas and certicates. Social capital, on the other hand, is acquired
through group membership, and is essentially a reection of the social network an
actor can mobilise.
Language policy, as a complex social phenomenon, involves constant interac-
tion between a number of elds. In its narrowest sense, policy involves action in
two closely related elds, Politics1 and Public Administration, each with its own
particular structure and identity (cf. Lipsky 2010; Wodak 2011, 2015). Another
eld closely related to policy-related action is the Media, partly due to how close-
ly contemporary politicians have adapted to the practices of that eld (Wodak
2011, 2015), but also because communicating policy to the public occurs largely
through the media, and has evolved into a specialised sub-eld (Krzyżanowski
2013). In the case of language policy, another key eld is Linguistics, which is itself
part of the bigger eld of Academia and more broadly, of the public sphere (e.g.
Habermas 1989). Each of these elds is dened not only by a set of subject posi-
tions and by the allocation of capital within it, but also by a particular set of social
practices– ways of acting (and thinking) which have become part of the structure
of a particular eld (Bourdieu 1984).
. For the purpose of clarity, I will use initial capitals in this paper to denote particular elds.
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Field and capital in negotiating language policy
However, while elds themselves oer a set of broad social spaces, agents en-
gage in social actions in more situated local spaces, where a particular congu-
ration of social practices enables them to do so. Such windows arise in nexuses
of practices, which are understood as recognisable groupings of social practices
which “simultaneously [signify] the genre of an activity and the group of people
who engage in that activity” (Scollon 2001a, 150). In other words, nexuses are
structured meso- and micro-level social spaces which are constituted by specif-
ic ‘ways of doing things’ as well as a specic set of subject positions for actors
to ll (cf. Scollon 2001b, 2008). Scollon famously gives the example of buying a
cup of coee as a nexus of practices, where practices such as ‘queuing’, ‘ordering’
and ‘paying’ intersect with subject positions like ‘customer’ and ‘cashier’ (Scollon
2001b, 1).
e link between elds, located at the macro-social level, and nexuses of prac-
tice, located at the micro level, allows a comprehensive examination of what spe-
cic social activities constitute “policy”, and how these activities are related across
dierent scales (Hult 2010, 2015). Within Politics, policy is ‘done’ at parliamentary
sessions but also in low-, mid- and top-level meetings of various types (e.g. Wodak
2000). In Public administration, meetings are again important, but they are oen
geared towards applying an already existing policy, particularly at the local level
of policy implementation (e.g. Johnson and Johnson 2015). At these meetings,
policy meanings are codied and contested, and actors’ agencies are inhibited or
enhanced (Hornberger 2005; Johnson 2013).
What cannot be underestimated when using space as a metaphor for social
structure, however, is its dynamic nature. If society is examined as a set of elds
and nexuses of practice, these should not be seen as representing xed relations
of scale, but as constantly shiing and open to renegotiation. As Bourdieu himself
acknowledges, elds are dynamic entities whose structure in any given moment in
time is the result of past struggles (Bourdieu 1993, 30). Such struggles occur at the
micro-level, in individual nexuses of practice, where the allocation of capital with-
in a single eld can be questioned, but perhaps more pressingly to this paper, the
value of capital from multiple elds can also be negotiated within a single nexus of
practices. e value of various types of resources (e.g. knowledge and skills, titles,
physical possessions) can be contested, and may shi during interaction between
actors, thus redrawing lines of power in local settings.
. Data and method
is paper examines how power lines were re-drawn at a meeting of the Committee
for Culture in the Slovene National Assembly as a result of an interaction between
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Kristof Savski
two elds, Politics and Linguistics.2 e analysis reported on was part of a larg-
er study on the draing and implementation of the Resolution for a National
Language Policy Programme 2014-2018 (RLP-14), the language policy document
discussed at the meeting. As the focus of this paper is not on the policy itself, but
rather on the negotiations about it in the committee, details about it are given
where needed to contextualise individual exchanges, whereas a more in-depth
analysis is provided elsewhere (see Savski 2016, 2017).
My methodology drew on mediated discourse analysis (MDA, see e.g. Scollon
2001a, 2001b, 2008) in that it had the goal of identifying and describing the indi-
vidual social actions that took place at the committee session as a nexus of prac-
tices. Social actions are seen as one-time instantiations of social practices within a
particular site of engagement (Scollon 2001a), which is in turn seen as a real-time
window where practices intersect in such a way that enables an action to occur
(Scollon 1998). As the particular focus of my study was on policy, my analysis paid
the most detailed attention to ‘policy actions’, such as reading, interpreting, nego-
tiating, and writing (see e.g. Hult 2015). e study’s overall objective was therefore
to construct a multi-perspective account of the committee as a site of engagement
with policy.
For MDA, analysing a nexus of practices means engaging with it on three dis-
tinct levels. It involves investigating the historical body, referring to the knowledge
and experiences contained within the habitus of participating actors, as well as the
specic discourses which can be detected in the nexus, and the interaction order,
referring to the social norms which govern interaction in the nexus (e.g. Scollon
and Scollon 2004, 19). However, in contrast to MDA, whose primary methodol-
ogy is ethnography, this study was conducted from a historical perspective, and
could therefore not rely on methods like participant observation. Instead, my ap-
proach to data collection was designed as a historical ethnography in that it consti-
tuted “an attempt to elicit structure and culture from the documents created prior
to an event in order to understand how people in another time and place made
sense of things” (Vaughan 2004, 321; see also Savski 2017, Geiger and Ribes 2011).
My data collection was particularly guided by critical discursive approaches
to historical analysis, which foreground triangulation, the collection of various
dierent data sources to construct a more pluralistic description of whatever phe-
nomenon is being analysed, as a key principle for such analyses (Wodak etal. 2009,
7–10; see also Flowerdew 2012; Galasinska and Krzyżanowski 2009; Heer etal.
2008; Wodak 2000). A key feature of this study was therefore a “thick” approach to
data collection, which took into account the following ve types of sources:
. To make references to these elds distinct, I will use initial capitals throughout the paper.
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Field and capital in negotiating language policy
a. Transcripts of the session in question were obtained from ocial sources and
served as the primary source for the identication of the dierent social ac-
tions that were performed at the session..
b. Video recordings of the session, archived by Slovene national television, were
used both to verify the accuracy of the transcripts and as a supplementary
resource for observing social actions.
c. In-depth interviews3 were conducted with three key participants in the ses-
sion (see Table1) in order to provide individual narratives regarding specic
occurrences at the committee session, focussing particularly on tensions that
emerged during negotiations.
d. Various types of texts that are produced around a parliamentary session, such
as reports, proposed amendments, overviews, etc., were also used as second-
ary resources for analysis. ese documents were collected and examined as
they became relevant– proposed amendments were, for instance, examined
as negotiations about them became the focus of the analysis. In MDA’s terms,
the texts were examined in detail in terms of the concrete social actions they
mediated (Scollon 2008, 18), which allowed my textual analysis to establish a
balance between a participant-centred approach which followed prompts by
actors at the session, and a researcher-centred reading which considered the
text in relation to other texts analysed (see also Savski 2017).
e. As the relevance of eld and capital became apparent, available information
about the backgrounds of the specic actors involved (e.g. education, previous
employment, previous engagement with language policy) was collected in or-
der to provide a deeper understanding of how the historical body of the nexus
of practices may have been shaped by the habitus of those occupying dierent
subject positions.
is broad approach to data collection was specically intended to counter-act the
clear limitations of conducting nexus analysis from a distance, without having the
opportunity to establish a clear “zone of identication” (Scollon and Scollon 2004,
11). For instance, as the interviews were collected a signicant period aer the
session (ca. 14 and 18 months), they were therefore unavoidably marked by any
events that had occurred in the meantime, by the dierent rationalisations that
actors had developed for their own actions (see e.g. “post hoc coherence”, Wodak
2011, 116), by a lack of clear memory of the events concerned, or potentially by
. e data collection process was approved by the ethics committee at the institution where
the research was conducted (Lancaster University). Participants were given the option of ano-
nymity, but all declined and stated that they wished to be named in the study and associated
publications.
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Kristof Savski
the unwillingness of participants to give certain details or their wish to inuence
my understanding of events.
e analysis was conducted in several rounds, focussing rst on identifying the
key features of the interaction order that governed this nexus of practices, which
was aided by taking into account the interviewees’ comments regarding parlia-
mentary practice. en, aided by my broader investigation into the creation and
implementation of the language policy under discussion (see Savski 2016, 2017),
the discourses in place were identied and mapped against my broader investi-
gation of media discourse and debates among policymakers. Finally, the social
actions performed by actors at the meeting were analysed by using the transcript
and video recording, with other sources of data used to aid this process. is stage
of the analysis involved constant shiing from deductive to inductive perspectives
in order to test both pre-existing as well as emergent themes and hypotheses (e.g.
regarding the role that ‘insider’ knowledge would play in such a negotiation).
. Debating a language strategy in the Slovene parliament
is section provides an overview of three key eld- and capital-related themes
that emerged from my analysis of a debate in the Committee for Culture (below:
NA-Cult), which took place on 28 June 2013, where deputies and members of the
public debated and proposed amendments to RLP-14. e rst section analyses
the historical body of the nexus, and focusses particularly on how, during various
parts of the debate, many deputies attempted to legitimize their position by dem-
onstrating possession of sources of cultural and social capital from Linguistics. I
then examine one example of negotiation between the committee chair and one
of the linguists present at the session, where the two struggle for authority, each
drawing on cultural capital from Linguistics. Finally, I show how cultural capital
from Politics played a key role at the session once a decision needed to be made,
with key actors working to create a consensus.
Table1. List of interviewees
Majda Potrata Involved in debating, amending and adopting RLP-14 in parliament
Chair of the Committee for Culture, Slovene National Assembly
Dr Simona Bergoč Responsible for administrating the draing of RLP-14 and its initial
implementation
Head of the Department of Slovene Language, Ministry of Culture
Dr Uroš Grilc Responsible for administrating the draing of RLP-14 and its initial
implementation
Minister of Culture (2013–14)
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Field and capital in negotiating language policy
. e importance of capital from Linguistics
A striking feature of this NA-Cult session were the disparate backgrounds of the
various actors present (for an overview, see Table2). Only two of the deputies pres-
ent could be seen as ‘career politicians’ who had spent the majority of their work-
ing lives working in that eld, while the nine remaining members had had various
dierent types of educational and professional experience. Many of the members
had worked at various levels of the educational sector, including higher education,
and several had PhDs. Two of the deputies, junior member Janja Napast and chair
Majda Potrata held BA and MA degrees in Linguistics respectively, and one of the
representatives of the government (Simona Bergoč) held a PhD in that eld, while
the rapporteur from the National Council4 held a PhD in Literature.
Table2. Detailed overview of actors at NA-Cult on 28 June 2013
Role in committee Name (aliation) Status and relevant background
Committee mem-
bers (government
coalition parties)
Majda Potrata (Social
Democrats)
Chair of NA-Cult
NA Member 2000–2014
Background: university lecturer, high school
teacher; MA in Slovene Literature
Samo Bevk (Social
Democrats)
NA Member 1996–2014
Background: mayor, museum director
Dragan Bosnić (Positive
Slovenia)
Deputy Chair
NA Member 2011–2014
Background: high school teacher (biology),
athletics coach
Jožef Kavtičnik (Positive
Slovenia)
NA Member 2000–2004 (Liberal
Democrats), 2011–2014
Background: primary school headmaster
Aljoša Jerič (Positive
Slovenia)
NA Member 2013–2014
Background: musician
Jani Möderndorfer
(Positive Slovenia)
Not regular member, replacing Mitja Meršol
NA Member 2011-
Background: sign language interpreter,
public administration
Branko Kurnjek (Citizens’
List)
NA Member 2013–14
Background: researcher at Institute for
Information Sciences, Maribor
. e Slovene parliament is bicameral, with the 90-member National Assembly being the main
elected legislature, while the 45-member National Council is a consultative body with few leg-
islative powers.
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Kristof Savski
Table2. (continued)
Role in committee Name (aliation) Status and relevant background
Committee mem-
bers (opposition
parties)
Janja Napast (Slovene
Democratic Party)
NA Member 2011–2014
Background: reporter; BA in Linguistics
Jožef Jerovšek (Slovene
Democratic Party)
NA Member 1996–2014
Background: head of planning in a chemical
factory
Alenka Jeraj (Slovene
Democratic Party)
NA Member 2004-
Background: career politician
Matej Tonin (Nova
Slovenija)
Not regular member, replacing Ljudmila
Novak
NA Member 2011-
Background: career politician
Representatives of
the Government
Uroš Grilc Minister of Culture (2013–2014)
Background: researcher, university lecturer,
public administration; PhD in Philosophy
Simona Bergoč Head, Department of Slovene Language,
Ministry of Culture (2011-)
Background: university lecturer, public
administration; PhD in Linguistics
National Council
rapporteur
Zoran Božič NC member representing educational sector
Background: university lecturer; PhD in
Literature
Parliamentary Legal
Counsel
Samo Divjak PhD in Law
Members of the
public
Janez Orešnik Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics,
University of Ljubljana; PhD in Linguistics;
member of the Slovene Academy of Arts
and Sciences
Simon Krek Researcher, Jožef Stefan Institute; draing
team member; PhD in Linguistics
Tomaž Wraber President, Association of Blind and Sight
Impaired Societies of Slovenia
Jožef Gregorc Representative, Association of Blind and
Sight Impaired Societies of Slovenia
Several members of the public were also present. Among these, two linguists
were in attendance, representing the two key interest groups interested in the
Resolution for a National Language Policy Programme 2014–2018. As detailed
elsewhere (Savski 2017), the draing of RLP-14 had seen a clash between two
groups in Slovene linguistics, one linked to traditional institutions and approaches,
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Field and capital in negotiating language policy
and another voicing the interests of a younger generation which had established
new, alternative research centres. At the NA-Cult session, the traditional side, cen-
tred around the Academy of Arts and Sciences, was represented by Janez Orešnik,
Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics (University of Ljubljana). Simon Krek,
researcher at the Jožef Stefan Institute, was there to represent the interests of other
institutions, who had argued for a more competitive approach to distributing re-
search funding, a large amount of which is currently guaranteed to institutions
like the Academy.
In the committee as an institutionalised and gated nexus of practices, these
two linguists, while major stakeholders in the policy, were outsiders, both formally
(only elected deputies can be members of committees) and, presumably, also in-
formally (little accumulated capital in the eld of politics, little or no socialisation
into its practices). However, as indicated by a close analysis of the debate, the pres-
ence of many other actors with backgrounds in the eld of Linguistics meant that
these two actors were not placed at a disadvantage despite their lack of capital in
Politics. Instead, because the debate centred on the topic of language policy, capital
from Linguistics played a key role not only in its embodied form, as internalised
knowledge, but also acted as an explicit means of constructing authority. is
came to light particularly in the early stage of the debate, when the actors present
were invited to present their views on the proposed policy.
(1) [Napast] ank you very much, madam chairperson, good day to all present,
good day as well to, if I may, my former professor, Mr. Orešnik. […]
is example from Janja Napast, holder of a BA in Linguistics, can be seen as an
attempt to assert herself through social capital, by invoking a pre-existing relation-
ship with Orešnik to legitimate her own position in the debate, perhaps to com-
pensate for her lack of a priori legitimacy as a rst-term deputy, and at that time
the youngest parliamentary deputy at 27. However, Napast was soon joined in her
eorts to build capital by the highly experienced committee chair, Majda Potrata:
(2) [Potrata] […] I myself, before I became a politician, dealt with these matters,
let me just remind you of the very important name of the excellent Slovene
linguist and reputed professor in Vienna and other things, Fran Miklošič,
who produced readers in Slovene to allow teaching in Slovene at Slovene
grammar schools in the 1850s. I’ll spare you all the history since then,
because I excel in it […]
Potrata, already a holder of considerable capital as the formal highest author-
ity in the committee, also makes explicit references to her own past experience
in Linguistics, as a former high school teacher, university lecturer and holder of
an MA in the eld, and even supports this by demonstrating her knowledge of a
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Kristof Savski
relevant historical narrative. As indicated below, Potrata continued to invoke her
background while debating with the key stakeholders present at the session.
e actions of Napast and Potrata indicate that the lines of power in the nexus
of practices were drawn in a far more complex manner than a distinction between
‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ could account for. In addition to capital from Politics be-
ing relevant, various types of capital from Linguistics were also a source of self-
legitimation in the debate. One side-eect of this was that deputies who could
rely on neither cultural nor social capital from Linguistics were potentially put in
a position of temporary disempowerment. For instance, when reading a letter he
had received from a member of the public– a linguist– Matej Tonin, deputy for
conservative opposition party New Slovenia, made the following comments:
(3) [Tonin] I’m not really an expert for Slovene, but I would like to read you a
letter I received from a Slovene linguist, and it says the following, to be very
precise and not say anything supercially or incorrectly. And so it says the
following [reads the letter]
When Tonin introduces the anonymous letter, he clearly positions himself as a
‘non-expert’ who is merely voicing the words of another actor, the true expert. e
anonymous writer is introduced as a ‘Slovene linguist’, and Tonin makes clear ef-
forts to position his reading as the mere voicing of the concerns of the expert (‘to
be very precise’). By resorting to ventriloquation (Bakhtin 1981) in this way, Tonin
is able to overcome his own lack of cultural capital from Linguistics by positioning
himself the mouthpiece for another actor, one who is clearly identied as a holder
of signicant capital in Linguistics, and therefore potentially boosting his own au-
thority in the debate.
. ‘Experts’ and ‘politicians’
e capital that deputies had built up during the debate would play an impor-
tant role as more concrete negotiations began regarding particular amendments.
However, one remark from my interview with chair Majda Potrata indicates that
such negotiations are oen troublesome for parliamentary deputies when they in-
volve clashes with experts:
(4) [Potrata] Entering into politics means that you stop being an expert to
people, and no matter how good an expert you were before, you become a
politician, and people begin to treat you with great distance
In other words, Potrata’s understanding of her own position, as a prominent poli-
tician, was that it had caused capital she had previously built up in the eld of
linguistics to become devalued, which perhaps gives insight into her own explicit
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Field and capital in negotiating language policy
eorts to secure her authority in the debate (see above). e importance of these
eorts became clear during an extended negotiation with linguist Janez Orešnik
about the role of the institution he was representing, the Academy of Arts and
Sciences. e status of the Academy, the traditional locus of corpus planning in
Slovene linguistics, had been a topic of debate between linguists throughout the
draing of RLP-14 (see Savski 2017), but it was at the meeting of NA-Cult that a
decision needed to be made about how its role was to be specied in the docu-
ment. As the transcript below indicates, the negotiations about this between the
two presupposed relatively specialised knowledge, indicating just how central
capital from Linguistics had become in the debate.
(5) a. [Potrata] […] I understand [the role of] these state institutions as
providing funds in the state budget, publishing tenders, and then people
apply for these tenders and are assigned tasks. […] And if we say that
these state institutions will work in cooperation with the Academy, and
put the Academy in the rst place, this seems to me to guarantee that
this institution with its research institutes will not be side-lined. […]
Please, Dr Orešnik.
b. [Orešnik] Well, I could agree with this, but there is a problem which has
been mentioned twice before today, and this is normativity. Normativity
has to be in the hands of one institution, we cannot have two or three
normativities in Slovenia, as this would mean that for instance some
schools follow one orthography and others another orthography and so
on. e Academy has to have some special rights because of this. Has to.
c. [Potrata] I’m not opposing you Dr Orešnik, but I doubt that the Slovene
grammar of any next author willalso need to have the status of a
normative manual, which will be approved by the Academy. Our views
seem to be dierent here. Please.
d. [Orešnik] Yes, you’re completely correct. I’m talking about normative
manuals such as the orthography, the dictionary of standard Slovene,
terminological dictionaries and perhaps some other things I’ve forgotten
right now.
e exchange begins with Potrata providing her own proposal for how RLP-14
should position dierent institutions in the Slovene linguistic sphere, favouring the
Academy but clearly separating it from the state and binding it to cooperation with
other institutions (turn 5a). Orešnik, advocating the position that the Academy
should solely be responsible for normativity (corpus planning)5 in order to avoid
social anomie, reacts to this challenge by making a series of unmitigated claims
. In the context of Slovene linguistics, normativity refers to the corpus planning activity of aca-
demic institutions such as the Academy. Historically, it has been realised through the produc-
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
All rights reserved
Kristof Savski
(‘has to’, ‘cannot’, ‘has to’, ‘has to’, turn 5b), which forces Potrata to attempt a repair
by mitigating her own stance and stressing her agreement (‘I am not opposing
you’, turn 5c). Orešnik then oers a conciliatory statement of agreement (turn 5d),
suggesting that Potrata’s withdrawal had been successful. e exchange continues:
(5) e. [Potrata] ank you. I won’t remember if its Lithuania or Latvia,
but anyway, one of these Baltic countries leaves normativity to its
government, the executive branch. I don’t want times like that, that’s
why I think [RLP-14] should say that [normativity] should be handled
by institutions which have the knowledge, the potential, and everything,
to decide about these things. But I understand this section about
language description as being about more than just dictionaries, but also
including other language descriptions, and that’s why I’m talking about
grammar. Please.
f. [Orešnik] I only wanted to foreground the role of the SAZU in
normativity.
g. [Potrata] Yes.
h. [Orešnik] Only that.
i. [Potrata] Yes, thank you.
j. [Orešnik, smiling] And I would wish that this be taken into account in
the resolution.
k. [Potrata, smiling] Yes, thank you. Please, Mrs. Jeraj.
In this exchange, Potrata again attempts to build cultural capital and assert her
own vision, again doing so by explicitly demonstrating her knowledge of linguis-
tics (turn 5e). e following turns are an indicator of the antagonism this creates,
as Orešnik rst distances himself from Potrata’s statements by reframing the topic
(turn 5f), and later oers a statement which includes several layers of hedging
(turn 5j), but one which can ultimately be seen as a strong expression of volition,
given his position as a major stakeholder in the policy and the negotiating situa-
tion. Turns 5f–5k are also interesting as they depart from the normal interaction
order in the committee, where the chair explicitly controls the beginning and end
of each turn. In this case, Orešnik intervenes twice without Potrata explicitly al-
lowing him to do so, and her turns (5g, 5i, 5k) indicate an increasing amount of
force being used to signal that Orešnik’s turn has ended. e fact that they ex-
changed smiles at this point of the interaction can also be seen as a signal that both
were aware of the potential face threat caused by his violation of parliamentary
practices.
tion of manuals (dictionaries, orthographies, grammars) as well as through wide-spread editing
of texts before they are published (for more detail, see Savski in press).
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
All rights reserved
Field and capital in negotiating language policy
e power struggle between these two powerful actors was somewhat in-
congruous, given that the two were in fact mostly in agreement over the role of
the Academy. As Potrata herself had explained to me in unambiguous terms, she
believed the Academy and its Institute for Slovene Language were justied in
their calls to have their leading position in corpus planning specied in RLP-14.
However, Potrata also argued that a compromise solution was needed, and was lat-
er instrumental in negotiating the amendment which attempted to nd common
ground between the two positions (see below). In this interaction, however, the
antagonism between the two can be seen as a consequence of Potrata’s attempts to
assume a position of equality in a situation where Orešnik’s age (73), titles (mem-
ber of the Academy, Emeritus Professor, PhD) and reputation, in addition to his
knowledge, would have granted him a much higher level of cultural capital than
that of Potrata in a Linguistics debate, whereas Potrata would have held a much
higher amount of capital in a Politics debate.
. Capital in political decision-making
While Orešnik’s debate with Potrata indicates an ongoing struggle for dominance,
his main antagonist at the session was not Potrata, but linguist Simon Krek from
the Jožef Stefan Institute. While Orešnik lobbied for the Academy to have a central
role in language policy, Krek argued against this, advocating a liberalised approach
instead, one which would not presuppose the dominance of any particular insti-
tution. is eventually led a split within the committee along political lines, as
Orešnik and other linguists associated with the Academy had already managed to
gain the explicit support of deputies from the two conservative opposition parties,
the Democratic Party and New Slovenia (this mirrored alliances made during the
draing of the document, see Savski 2017). e deputies of these two parties pro-
posed an amendment to specify the Academy’s role in the text, as did the govern-
ment coalition under the inuence of committee chair Majda Potrata and Minister
of Culture Uroš Grilc. e two amendments diered slightly in their wording, as
indicated in Figure1.
As can be seen, the opposition’s amendment was signicantly more specic
in that it not only made the Academy a ‘responsible institution’ in terms of pol-
icy implementation, it also specied the activities that this involved– producing
‘normative manuals’ and ‘orthographies’. is text closely followed the proposals
that linguists associated with the Academy had made before, and which had been
added into one of the earlier dras of RLP-14 (Savski 2017). e proposal made by
the government, on the other hand, was a compromise advocated in particular by
Uroš Grilc, the Minister of Culture who had overseen the removal of all mentions
of the Academy from the text before it was submitted to parliament (ibid.). He
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Kristof Savski
now argued that cooperation between as many institutions as possible was needed,
and proposed a much less specic amendment.
When the proposed amendments came to a vote, there were two options: as
the two proposed amendments overlapped, either one of the two would be adopt-
ed by a simple majority of the committee deputies present and the other discarded,
or a compromise solution would be found. As the coalition had a majority in the
session, it would have been able to adopt the government’s amendment. However,
what in fact happened was that Potrata called a brief recess just before the vote, in
order to quickly meet with other interested actors and come to agreement. In prac-
tice, this meant that the TV relay was temporarily suspended, and no transcription
was made– in other terms, political decision-making was moved from the front-
to the back-stage (Wodak 2011). As it emerged from my interviews, there were
pressing reasons for this decision:
(6) [Potrata] [I would call a recess] if I sensed, based my experience as a long-
time deputy, if I had the feeling that something would go wrong when
it came to the vote. Here I have to admit that I can be a bit personal, if I
thought something was good, that it should be passed, I then ensured it was.
Meaning that you call a pause and go talk to the coalition partners, without
the public, and explain to them in detail and in calm, one more time, why it
might be good to add or remove something. […]
In this extract, Potrata highlights how her experience as a deputy allowed her
to anticipate potentially problematic situations, and how important this was in
achieving particular goals. She highlights the agency this granted her in terms of
the ability to push through solutions she agreed with, and how key negotiations in
the backstage were to achieving this. She continues:
(7) [Potrata] ese are usually things that are not seen in the committee, we
can tell you about this. Before every public committee session is held,
negotiations within the coalition also take place, and these are cruel
negotiations, oen worse negotiations than those between the coalition and
opposition at the session. Because the opposition there, if you ignore their
insults and teasing and that stu, when you look at the contents of their
arguments, they really don’t have the weight that sometimes the dierent
arguments and positions of coalition partners have. Here you get conicts
between sometimes very dierent concepts […]
It is signicant that what Potrata again foregrounds here are back-stage nego-
tiations with coalition partners. At this time, her party (Social Democrats) was
the second largest partner in a four-party centre-le coalition, with three parties
in the opposition. In this highly fragmented political space, maintaining face in
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
All rights reserved
Field and capital in negotiating language policy
negotiations is key, particularly for smaller coalition partners seeking to maintain
distinct identities. In the two extracts above, Potrata describes how back-stage ne-
gotiations within the coalition can be ‘cruel’, but also highlights their relative ratio-
nality as compared to the coalition vs. opposition debates in front of cameras. is
draws parallels with Naurin’s (2007) study of lobbying in the European Union,
and his nding that the nature of negotiation in the back-stage was oen more
pragmatic than in the front-stage.
Government
In section 2.2.3 (Standardisation),
change final paragraph to read:
Responsible institutions: Agency for
Research and Development, Ministry
of Education, Ministry of Culture (all
in cooperation with the Academy of
Arts and Sciences, universities and
research institutions)
Advocate
Uroš Grilc
In section 2.2.3 (Standardisation),
add new third paragraph reading:
e base codification manual and
Slovene orthography is, in line with
tradition and good practice, adopted
by the Academy of Arts and Sciences,
which in line with its legal obligations
also cooperates in the development of
all other base language manuals of
Slovene with normative contents.
Change final paragraph to read:
Responsible institutions: Agency for
Research and Development, Ministry
of Education, Ministry of Culture,
Academy of Arts and Sciences
Advocate
Alenka Jeraj
Opposition
Figure1. Overview of amendments and their main advocates (underlining by author,
indicates proposed additions)
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
All rights reserved
Kristof Savski
e amendment that was passed following this short negotiation is a mix of fea-
tures proposed by both sides (see Figure2). Most notably, the nal amendment
combined the insertions suggested by the government– making the Academy
responsible for implementation– and the text proposed by the opposition depu-
ties – specifying the role of the Academy. Commenting on this solution, Grilc
made the following remark:
(8) [Grilc] [At that session] you can see very well when someone from the
outside, who is not a 100% expert, who is there as a politician, looks at
things from a common-sense perspective, in the end that is what you need
to get to where you had to eventually get.
Grilc’s identication with the compromise amendment was echoed by Potrata,
who pointed out the changed text to me during our interview, and remarked “is
In section 2.2.3 (Standardisation),
add new third paragraph reading:
e foundational resource of
standardisation, the Slovene
Orthography, is, following tradition,
good practice, in accordance with its
legal obligations and in cooperation
with all institutions in the area of
language planning, adopted by the
Slovene Academy of Arts and
Sciences. In line with its legal
obligations, it [the Academy] also
cooperates in the development of all
other base language manuals of
Slovene with normative contents.
Change nal paragraph to read:
Responsible institutions: Agency for
Research and Development, Ministry
of Education, Ministry of Culture
(all in cooperation with the Academy
of Arts and Sciences, universities
and research institutions)
Government
proposal
(see above)
Opposition
proposal, extended
(see above)
Figure2. Final amendment (underlining by author, indicates proposed additions to the
text)
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
All rights reserved
Field and capital in negotiating language policy
is the fruit of my labours”, while later explaining that the work of a politician is
to “seek compromise between dierent interests”. What their remarks suggest is
that the balance of power in the committee had shied: when decisions needed
to be made at the end of the session, being a politician became an advantage, and
cultural capital from Linguistics became secondary to that from Politics in terms
of governing power relations between actors. However, while the role of capital
from Linguistics had come primarily from the formal, front-stage debate, and its
function had been centred around self-legitimation, cultural capital from Politics
took on an implicit, embodied form, as the eld-specic practical skills that only
insiders possessed.
. Conclusions
Considering the compromise amendment in light of the prior history of RLP-14,
the importance of this power shi becomes obvious. e writers of the policy,
linguists appointed to do so by successive governments, argued over how RLP-
14 should dene the roles of dierent institutions, with one side writing a ver-
sion favouring competition for funds, and another revising the policy to favour
traditional institutions like the Academy (Savski 2017). In the NA-Cult session
analysed in this paper, linguists once again took centre-stage and played a key
role in negotiations about the policy. Due to topic and the backgrounds of the
key actors involved in the committee session, the historical body of the nexus of
practices shied, and temporarily during parts of the debate, possessing cultural
capital from Linguistics became a determining factor in governing power relations
among those present.
e episode of RLP-14 highlights a key characteristic of Politics, namely its
open-endedness. While Politics can broadly be dened as a eld constituted by
dierent practices which are “directly oriented to, or otherwise shape, the exer-
cise of state power” (Jessop 2014, 208), its boundaries are far from xed, but are
rather subject to continuous renegotiation through the processes of politicization
and depoliticization (ibid.). ese processes consist of a discursive construction
of boundaries, driven by the needs of individuals and groups to construct certain
issues as part of the scope of state governance, while excluding others. RLP-14 had
been depoliticised in that its writing was farmed out to linguists, non-politicians,
who shaped its contents according to their interests, while politicians mainly held
their distance (Savski 2017).
e NA-Cult session analysed in this paper is therefore a case study of what
happens when a expert-written language policy is politicised, and when the ex-
perts responsible for its writing attempt to push through their own agendas by
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
All rights reserved
Kristof Savski
using political means, bartering/negotiation and alliance-building. However, what
the analysis shows is that what matters in the particular situation where this occurs
are the backgrounds of the dierent actors occupying key subject positions at that
time. As indicated by the analysis, while a committee session in the Slovene parlia-
ment is undoubtedly a stable nexus of practices, whose interaction order is gov-
erned both by implicit practices and explicit rules of proceedings, any particular
debate is also shaped by how the ‘baggage’ of those involved shapes the historical
body as well as the discourses in place.
is indicates that, as much as analyses of discourse correctly focus on prac-
tices, that which is typical and which is constitutive to dierent social situations,
focussing on the ways in which the habitus of each individual aects interactions
can a new dimension to the explanatory power of such studies. In the session
analysed in this paper, this is best exemplied by the role played by the commit-
tee chair, deputy Majda Potrata, who demonstrates how inuential an individual
can be in formulating policies under favourable conditions (cf. Källkvist and Hult
2016, Wodak 2000). As one of the most senior deputies in the committee, Potrata
was able to rely on a high amount of institutionalised cultural capital from Politics
to guide the debate, while also being able to rely on a more implicit skillset (em-
bodied cultural capital) to negotiate the potential impasses of front-stage politics.
At the same time, because she also had access to assets from Linguistics and be-
cause other actors with similar backgrounds were present at the meeting, Potrata
was able to maintain an authoritative position even when the discussion shied
toward highly specialised topics, giving her an edge over other deputies.
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Address for correspondence
Kristof Savski
Department of Languages and Linguistics
Faculty of Liberal Arts
15 Karnjanavanich Road
90110 Hat Yai, Songkla
ailand
Kristof.s@psu.ac.th
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5561-6695
Biographical notes
Kristof Savski is a lecturer at Prince of Songkla University (Hat Yai, ailand). His main re-
search interests include historical and critical sociolinguistics and language policy, with a par-
ticular focus on the social impact of linguists in Slovenia since the 19th Century, as well as on
contemporary language policies in ailand.
Publication history
Date received: 10 January 2017
Date accepted: 20 October 2017
Published online: 30 November 2017
© 2018. John Benjamins Publishing Company
All rights reserved
