Working Paper
TPCS 24: Superdiverse Repertoires and the Individual
While earlier authors on repertoire emphasized the connection between (socio-)linguistic resources, knowledge and communities, we shift the direction from communities towards individual subjects. This working paper describes how this shift invites a new form of analysis. No longer seen as the static, synchronic property of a ‘speech community’, we should now approach repertoires as an inroad into Late-Modern subjectivities – the subjectivities of people whose membership of social categories is dynamic, changeable and negotiable, and whose membership is at any time always a membership-by-degree.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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3 minutes
By Jan Blommaert and Ad Backus
Abstract
Repertoire belongs to the core vocabulary of sociolinguistics, yet very little fundamental reflection has been done on the nature and structure of repertoires. In early definitions, repertoires was seen as a triad of language resources, knowledge of language (‘competence’) and a community. Due to developments in the study of language competence and in the study of social organization, this triad can no longer remain intact. In a super-diversity context, mobile subjects engage with a broad variety of groups, networks and communities, and their language resources are consequently learned through a wide variety of trajectories, tactics and technologies, ranging from fully formal language learning to entirely informal ‘encounters’ with language. These different learning modes lead to very different degrees of knowledge of language, from very elaborate structural and pragmatic knowledge to elementary ‘recognizing’ languages, whereby all of these resources in a repertoire are functionally distributed in a patchwork of competences and skills. The origins of repertoires are biographical, and repertoires can in effect be seen as ‘indexical biographies’. This, then, allows us to reorient the triad of repertoires away from communities towards subjectivities, and suggest that repertoire analysis can be a privileged road into understanding Late-Modern subjectivities.
Keywords: Repertoire, language learning, subjectivity, super-diversity, globalization, competence, indexical biography, sociolinguistics
How to quote: Blommaert, J., & Backus, A. (2012). Superdiverse Repertoires and the Individual. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 24).
Read the full working paper here: Superdiverse Repertoires and the Individual.
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