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4 - Repertoires and competence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Jan Blommaert
Affiliation:
Universiteit van Tilburg, The Netherlands
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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)
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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  • Repertoires and competence
  • Jan Blommaert, Universiteit van Tilburg, The Netherlands
  • Book: The Sociolinguistics of Globalization
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511845307.006
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  • Repertoires and competence
  • Jan Blommaert, Universiteit van Tilburg, The Netherlands
  • Book: The Sociolinguistics of Globalization
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511845307.006
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Repertoires and competence
  • Jan Blommaert, Universiteit van Tilburg, The Netherlands
  • Book: The Sociolinguistics of Globalization
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511845307.006
Available formats
×