4 - Repertoires and competence

Summary

I argued in the preceding chapters that a sociolinguistics of globalization needs to be a sociolinguistics of mobile resources, not one of immobile languages. Our focus of analysis should be the actual linguistic, communicative, semiotic resources that people have, not abstracted and idealized (or ideologized) representations of such resources. Our focus should, therefore, be on repertoires, on the complexes of resources people actually possess and deploy. I already mentioned the ‘truncated’ nature of multilingual repertoires in super-diverse contexts such as those of a contemporary ‘global’ city. Multilingualism, I argued, should not be seen as a collection of ‘languages’ that a speaker controls, but rather as a complex of specific semiotic resources, some of which belong to a conventionally defined ‘language’, while others belong to another ‘language’. The resources are concrete accents, language varieties, registers, genres, modalities such as writing – ways of using language in particular communicative settings and spheres of life, including the ideas people have about such ways of using, their language ideologies. What matters in the way of language for real languages users are these concrete forms of language, or, to go by Hymes' words:

The place of language in the life of the community would be understood as more than a matter of sounds, spellings, grammatical categories and constructions. It would be properly understood as involving varieties and modalities, styles and genres, ways of using a language as a resource.

(Hymes 1996: 70)