The fields that Bourdieu distinguishes are those that make up society and its diversity of (partly overlapping) social practices: economics, politics, journalism, academia, sports, etc. Within these social fields, language and discourse play a constitutive role but that doesn't mean a social field is the same as a semantic field (or a lexical field). A social field is a relational configuration of people, objects, ideas, etc. that provides a structure and a history for a particular aspect of social life, shaping this into an organised space with its own "rules of the game" and its own "stakes" (what matters). Discourse functions within the social fields (for example, politics). Some fields are more autonomous than others, with journalism (the media practices) being a good example of high dependence on what is going on in other fields. In analysing bilingualism, your focus should be on what bilinguals are trying to accomplish within a particular social practice in this or that social field. For example, school is an "object" (building) used in education; education comes with its own participants, actions, legitimation, etc., and its own "rules of the game". It could be interesting to look at code switching in the context of rule-breaking behaviour.

Antoon De Rycker Thank you very much for your very concise and good answer. I also find the field very useful concept when researching special social space in detail or for researching society on a big scale and big data. Still, I have found myself in a bit of methodological mess, because I am working on a linguistic behaviour of a (small) ethnic group, located in a special geographic area. Sure there are some fields to consider also there (educational, media etc), but to describe or analyse that “class” of bilingual speakers, who practice their bilingualism in more or less all fields (the premise of balanced bilingualism), you have to consider the family (or private domain) and you have to consider public domain. I can hardly name these domains “the field”… this is my (Boursieusian?) problem.

Application shall be according to usage contexts

interesting question.

In that case, you have to limit yourself to those social practices you have access to in terms of data collection.

Applied to language use, I think the bourdieusian "field" could be somehow related to what sociolinguists call sociolect : a "system" (still open and dynamic) structured by speficic rules, stakes, power positions, tacit values etc. Hope it helps.

Sabina, I don't know if this will help

• Tobias Schroedler

Chapter Theories on Language, Value, Economics and Policy

Guillaume Carbou thank you for your answer, but the way I see Bourdieusian concepts the "sociolect" (sociolect's main identifier is a socioeconomic class, age, gender, and ethnicity in a certain speech community) is more or less equivalent to "linguistic habitus" and the knowledge of different sociolects can be encompassed in "linguistic capital." That is my view though.

Breda Leyne Thank you. I will check it out.