‘One nation, two languages’: representations of official languages on multilingual news websites in Belarus

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article analyses how two official languages of Belarus, Russian and Belarusian, are represented on the homepages of two national news websites through the analysis of media discourse within headlines and leads of news stories, and focusing on aspects of multimodality of websites. In view of the equal legal status of these languages, this study investigates the extent to which readers of news in Russian and Belarusian are exposed to different content, and how these differences are connected to existing language ideologies. Critical discourse analysis of textual contents of linguistic versions in combination with multimodal analysis of the websites’ layout revealed that Russian and Belarusian tend to be used differently in news on politics, culture and sports and, hence, are represented as having different values. More specifically, the media examined here present the same stories from different ideological perspectives and websites’ thematic sections include different news depending on the language of the webpage. This study demonstrated that multilingual websites represent a useful source of data for the study of language ideologies in the media. The methodological approach employed here can be replicated in other contexts characterised by bilingualism and diglossia [Fishman, Joshua A. 1967. “Bilingualism With and Without Diglossia; Diglossia With and Without Bilingualism.” Journal of Social Issues 23 (2): 29–38] linguistic situations.