The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity

Angela Creese, Adrian Blackledge, Angela Creese, Adrian Blackledge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138905092
• eBook ISBN: 9781317444671
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity provides an accessible and authoritative overview of this growing area, the linguistic analysis of interaction in superdiverse cities. Developed as a descriptive term to account for the increasingly stratified processes and effects of migration in Western Europe, 'superdiversity' has the potential to contribute to an enhanced understanding of mobility, complexity, and change, with theoretical, practical, global, and methodological reach.

With seven sections edited by leading names, the handbook includes 35 state-of-the art chapters from international authorities. The handbook adopts a truly interdisciplinary approach, covering:

• Cultural heritage
• Sport
• Law
• Education
• Business and entrepreneurship.

The result is a truly comprehensive account of how people live, work and communicate in superdiverse spaces.

This volume is key reading for all those engaged in the study and research of Language and Superdiversity within Applied Linguistics, Linguistic Anthropology and related areas.

Part I

Language and superdiversity

1

Repertoires, registers and linguistic diversity

Alastair Pennycook

Introduction: The reemergence of registers and repertoires

The intensification of interactive diversity in many contexts around the world – a result not only of increased migration, mobility and settlement, but also of migratory trajectories and transnational networks – is being met by a diversity of sociolinguistic responses (Arnaut et al. 2016). Translingual practices may not be as new as sometimes suggested – indeed, it might be argued they predate the invention of languages (Makoni and Pennycook 2007; Canagarajah 2013) – but they may nonetheless be on the increase. A serious consideration of the ways in which ideas about language have been constructed and invented forces us to consider anew not only emergent language mixes but the terms in which we think about them. As researchers have sought to shed some of the language ideological baggage of sociolinguistic ideas such as bilingualism and code-switching, two new types of terminology have come into play: on the one hand, neologisms such as translanguaging, polylanguaging and metrolingualism have been used to take us beyond the assumed frameworks of bounded languages, while on the other hand, older terminology such as heteroglossia, repertoires and registers has been mobilised to do similar work. While the first set of terms has engendered much discussion (some negative, some more positive), the increased use of terms such as repertoires and registers has received less attention.

After its initial development in the 1960s by Gumperz (1964) and others, two general trends can be ascertained in the life of the notion of repertoires: the broadening of its scope through its use with a range of other terms (style repertoires, ethnolinguistic repertoires, communicative repertoires and so on), and a gradual drift away from the collective to the individual (repertoires are not so much the collective properties of speech communities, but the accumulated resources of individual trajectories). Originally used to refer to the “suite of codes which a speaker is able to draw on” or “the linguistic range of an individual or a small group”, contemporary sociolinguistics typically “uses the idea of repertoire to cover the fluid language mixes used by young speakers in ethnically diverse urban situations” (Bell 2014: 104). It has thus recently reemerged as part of “post-Fishmanian” sociolinguistics (Blommaert, Leppännen and Spotti 2012: 18), signalling a move away from the sedimented terminology of bilingualism and code-mixing to focus instead on the accumulation of linguistic or, more broadly, semiotic resources at a speaker’s disposal.

Likewise emerging from work in the 1960s, the idea of register has also seen something of a revival in the new sociolinguistics. While repertoire has rarely had a very firm sociolinguistic grounding (its appearance as a technical sociolinguistic term over the past 50 years is intermittent), register has been a more accepted sociolinguistic concept. Three different, though related, lineages can be mapped out for the development of the notion of register: a sociolinguistic concept largely referring to specialised uses of vocabulary (though sometimes also syntax) such as ‘legalese’, as well as ways, from a more interactive position, of addressing people (involving different types of style) such as ‘baby talk’; a systemic-functional use of the term to account for language variation in social contexts; and a linguistic anthropological approach focusing particularly on how people recognise and name ways of using language (such as ‘street talk’). While the first two approaches to register have, for various reasons, rather run out of steam, it is this third approach that has been particularly taken up in contemporary sociolinguistics through the notion of enregisterment (Agha 2007). This chapter will review these recent trends in sociolinguistics, mapping out the redevelopment of this terminology and exploring the implications of the changes in how languages, individuals and collectives are understood.

Historical developments: Repertoires from totality of forms to lived experience

The notion of repertoire goes back to the work of Gumperz and others in the 1960s, as “the totality of linguistic forms regularly employed in the course of socially significant interaction” (Gumperz 1964: 137). The importance of the idea of a linguistic repertoire as a means to describe a plurality of codes within a community is grounded in the sociolinguistic imperative to deal with “actual speech instead of with langue”, obliging the researcher “to recognize the existence of a plurality of codes or code varieties in the same linguistic community” (Giglioli 1972: 15). Over the years, however, a difficulty emerged as to whether a repertoire was “the totality of linguistic varieties” used “by a particular community of speakers” (Trudgill 1974: 103) or whether it referred to the linguistic variety available to an individual. At first sight, the distinction might not seem an important one: the varieties of language available to a member of a community are the same as the varieties available to the community as a whole. Clearly, however, this is not necessarily the case: a person will only have access to some of the total varieties, and it is therefore important to distinguish between community and individual repertoires.

This distinction becomes more problematic both when we realize that the idea of community is much less stable than earlier imagined and because it forces us to ask where a repertoire is actually located – if not in a recognisable social entity or in a speaker’s head, where is it and how is it contained? The idea of a speech community that could hold together the idea of a repertoire came under fire from several quarters, with Pratt (1987) arguing for a linguistics of contact rather than a linguistics of community since it has always been a problematically normative and utopian ideal. Linguistic analysis, she suggests, might be better served not by studying a community assumed to share a language but rather perhaps by studying “a room full of people each of whom spoke two languages and understood a third, and held only one language in common with any of the others” (Pratt 1987: 50). Recent sociolinguistic orientations have also questioned the possibility of the notion of community under current conditions of mobility, fragmentation and superdiversity.

Platt and Platt (1975: 36) made a distinction between speech repertoire as “the repertoire of linguistic varieties utilised by a speech community which its speakers, as members of the community, may appropriately use” and verbal repertoire as “the linguistic varieties which are at a particular speaker’s disposal”. While this terminology gained little traction, a similar idea reappears in Bernstein’s distinction between repertoire (“the set of strategies and their analogic potential possessed by any one individual”) and reservoir (“the total of sets and its potential of the community as a whole”) (Bernstein 2000: 158). Thus while some sociolinguists recognised this tension, a broader consensus seemed to follow Wardaugh’s (1986: 129) suggestion that “The concept of ‘speech repertoire’ may be most useful when applied to individuals rather than to groups. We can use it to describe the communicative competence of individual speakers. Each person will then have a distinctive speech repertoire”.

Thus with no society or community to hold the notion of repertoire in place, repertoires have become attached to individuals and their life histories: “Repertoires are individual, biographically organized complexes of resources, and they follow the rhythms of actual human lives” (Blommaert and Backus 2013: 15). To be sure, these repertoires reflect the varied social, temporal and spatial trajectories of the individual, and are not thus some totality constructed from an internal linguistic competence: indeed, when Blommaert (2010: 103) talks of truncated repertoires, the focus is very much on how we accumulate bits of language along the way. Rymes (2014: 9–10) expands the idea through the notion of the communicative repertoire as “the collection of ways individuals use language and other means of communication (gestures, dress, posture, accessories) to function effectively in the multiple communities in which they participate”. Likewise, Hall, Cheng and Carson (2006: 232) propose that we should view “language knowledge not in terms of abstract system components but as communicative repertoires –conventionalized constellations of semiotic resources for taking action”.

Busch’s (2012, 2013) poststructuralist account of how subjects are discursively constructed takes this further, allowing us to see how the subject itself is a temporary and dispersed entity, a product of the discourses that make it rather than an individual with linguistic competencies. Busch’s (2012, 2013) understanding of repertoires diverges from Gumperz’s “synchronic space of social interactions” through a focus on the “diachronic time space of cultural re-enactment” (2012: 510). Drawing on the work of Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, Busch points to the limitations of Gumperz’s “outside perspective on speakers and their observable linguistic behaviour”, adding “a subject perspective which – drawing on phenomenological approaches – encompasses the body dimension of perceiving, experiencing, feeling, and desiring” (2012: 510).

Her more recent reworking of this, expanding the concept of the linguistic repertoire through a focus on the “lived experience of language” (Spracherleben) (Busch 2015: 2) that foregrounds the bodily and emotional dimension of intersubjective interaction takes this further in the direction of the dispersed subject, of distributed language and learning across a wider set of possibilities than just the individual and society. This allows for an understanding of a repertoire as not only a set of resources in the individual, or a pool of possibilities in a community, but rather as dispersed across these divides in ways that question the constitution of communities and individuals.

Core issues and topics: Register from specialised vocabulary to cultural models of action

The origins of the term register lie in the attempt to distinguish between linguistic variation according to the user (the class, gender, regional and other aspects of a speaker’s background) and variation according to use (the social context of language use) (Halliday et al. 1964). Registers typically include “what people metalinguistically label as ‘polite language,’ ‘geek speak,’ ‘informal speech,’ ‘God talk,’ ‘girl talk,’ or ‘slang’” (Ahearn 2012: 124), and are thus defined more by the context of use – the social role of the speaker, the relation to interlocutors and the purpose of the communication – than by predefined aspects of social background. Three slightly different approaches to register – the sociolinguistic, the social semiotic and the linguistic anthropological – have different implications for how we think about language. For sociolinguistics, the simplest definitions point to the specialised vocabulary of particular professions or occupations (surgeons, pilots, jazz fans and so on) (Wardaugh 1986). Trudgill (1974: 104) describes registers as “occupational linguistic varieties” such as law, medicine and engineering, and suggests they are “usually characterized solely by vocabulary differences”.

More broadly, however, they can be taken to include not merely vocabulary but also syntax (see Holmes 1992 for an analysis of the syntax of sports commentary), and to include ways of speaking, thus overlapping at times with the notion of style (formal and informal). Holmes (1992) includes specifically named registers such as journalese, baby-talk and legalese, as well as the language used by auctioneers, race-callers, sports commentators, airline pilots, criminals, financiers, politicians and disc-jockeys, and the language of particular professional contexts such as the courtroom or classroom. Registers in some ways, then, are the closest we get to the language of communities of practice. The overlap between registers and the notion of style – ways of speaking – as well as levels of formality, however, makes the idea of register at times difficult to separate from other ways of describing contextual language use. For a number of reasons, therefore, the concept of register “has not found much favour in contemporary sociolinguistics” (Coupland 2007: 15), and this line of work has added little in re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Language and superdiversity: An interdisciplinary perspective
• Part I: Language and superdiversity
• Part II: Researching communication in superdiverse contexts
• Part III: Language, superdiversity and heritage
• Part IV: Language, superdiversity and sport
• Part V: Language, superdiversity and business
• Part VI: Language, superdiversity and law
• Part VII: Language, superdiversity and education
• Index