Svenka Savić – Building An Academic Community In The Period of 1960-2010

Prof. Emerita Svenka Savić, Building An Academic Community In The Period of 1960-2010, with Bibliography of her works.

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In English (p. 24-44)

I’ll repeat this fact one more time: in order to survive and expand, the most crucial thing for an academic community is to educate new cadres. At the end of the 80s` I suggested to our Department that one semester subject Analyses of discourse should be introduced into curriculum. That was accepted, so I created the program of that course. Soon, based on teaching experience,  I wrote a textbook entitled Discourse analyses(Svenka Savich, 1993).  Next year, also on my suggestion, that subject became two-semester course for students in final years of studies. Analyses of discourse can be taught in various ways because it is an interdisciplinary field where language, culture and ideology intertwine.

 … Disintegration of common Serbo-Croatian language domain into individual languages also touches upon understanding of language identity, primarily that in public and official use. It was shown that newly-formed political elite in the newly-formed country (that successively changed its names from Yugoslavia to Serbia and Montenegro to Republic of Serbia) was well aware that language was the means to homogenize the nation and that it was important that state took care of the language as its mighty instrument. Thus, several frameworks for national language identity were already outlined in the Law on the official use of language (1991) and The Serbian language orthography (Mitar Peshikan, John Yerkovich and Mato Pizhuritza, 1993) and later on when the Committee for standardization of the Serbian language was formed in 1997. In those state documents there were no indications that a care would be taken about equality of “others” (there were just implicit terms about that), which also excluded gender sensitive talk and anything related to language discrimination.

… The objective was to prove the thesis about existence of patriarchal matrix for visibility of women in public and official language and to explain the mechanism of ideologization of language for the sake of patriarchization and conveying that matrix to new generations. The issue of standardizing gender equality in language is above all a political issue, not the issue of structure of Serbian language. As a finish of many years of collecting empirical material for the issue of gender and language, we published a book Gender and language (Svenka Savich et al. 2009). In the book, we presented a basic dictionary of professions and titles held by women in Serbian language and concrete rules on how to apply gender sensitive language in practice, primarily in official and public domain. Thus, the work on formation of a corps of research data was expanded once again because one of the objectives in the book was to show how empirical data notified in various dictionaries, media and conversational language prove the thesis that use of female gender forms for professions and titles held by women existed in earlier periods of Serbian language developments.