JAN BLOMMAERT & AD BACKUS

SUPERDIVERSE REPERTOIRES AND

THE INDIVIDUAL

INTRODUCTION

The term repertoire belongs to the core vocabulary of sociolinguistics.1 John

Gumperz, in the introduction to the epochal Directions in Sociolinguistics: The
Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz & Hymes 1972/1986) lists linguistic
repertoires as one of the basic sociolinguistic concepts (Gumperz 1972/1986: 20-21)
and defines it as the totality of linguistic resources (i.e. including both invariant
forms and variables) available to members of particular communities (italics
added). In his equally epochal Discourse Strategies, he reformulated this notion,
basically juxtaposing his original definition with the wider range of phenomena
programmatically addressed by Hymes (1972a/1986 and 1974):
Studies of language use are called for which concentrate on what Hymes
calls the means of speaking. This includes information on the local linguistic
repertoire, the totality of distinct language varieties, dialects and styles
employed in a community. Also to be described are the genres or art forms
in terms of which verbal performances can be characterized, such as myths,
epics, tales, narratives and the like. Descriptions further cover the various acts
of speaking prevalent in a particular group and finally the frames that
serve as instructions on how to interpret a sequence of acts. (Gumperz 1982:
155; italics in original; cf. also Bauman & Sherzer 1974: 7)
The narrower notion of linguistic repertoires is here combined with the broad and
somewhat less precise notion of means of speaking. The job of the Gumperz
Hymesian sociolinguists was to describe all of that, to put these things in relation to
each other, and to interpret them in terms of that other key notion in sociolinguistics,
communicative competence the knowing what and knowing how to use language
which Hymes pitted against Chomskyan competence (Hymes 1972b is the locus
classicus; see also Hymes 1992). Repertoire so became the word we use to describe
all the means of speaking, i.e. all those means that people know how to use and why
while they communicate, and such means, as we have seen, range from linguistic
ones (language varieties) over cultural ones (genres, styles) and social ones (norms
for the production and understanding of language). In the eyes of Gumperz, Hymes
and their peers, repertoires were tied to particular speech communities, the third
key sociolinguistic notion. Repertoires characterized communities within which
Ingrid de Saint-Georges and Jean-Jacques Weber (Eds.), Multilingualism and Multimodality: Current
Challenges for Educational Studies, 1132.
2013 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
J. BLOMMAERT & A. BACKUS

the sharedness of repertoire guaranteed smooth and normal communication.

This collocation of repertoires and communities was a precipitate of, let us say,
traditional ethnography, in which the ethnographer studied a community a
group of people that could somehow be isolated from the totality of mankind and be
studied in its own right.
This is very much where the concept has stayed since then; there has not been
much profound reflection on the notion of repertoire.2 The term is commonly
used in sociolinguistics, usually as a loosely descriptive term pointing to the total
complex of communicative resources that we find among the subjects we study.
Whenever repertoire is used, it presupposes knowledge competence because
having a particular repertoire is predicated on knowing how to use the resources
that it combines. The four decades of use of the term and its links to other concepts,
however, have seen quite some shifts and developments, notably in the field
of what one can broadly call language knowledge. This paper seeks to engage
with these developments and to bring them to bear on the notion of repertoire. If
patterns of language knowledge are better understood, we may be in a position to
be more precise in what we understand by repertoires. Likewise, we have moved
on in our understanding of community; and here, too, important new insights
can be projected onto the concept of repertoire. Repertoire can so be turned into
an empirically more useful and theoretically more precise notion, helpful for our
understanding of contemporary processes of language in society.
This is the intellectual motive for this paper. There is, however, a more practical
(or polemical) motive as well. In spite of significant advances in the field of
language knowledge, dominant discourses on this topic seem to increasingly turn to
entirely obsolete and conclusively discredited models of language knowledge. The
European Common Framework for Languages is naturally the most outspoken case,
but language and literacy testing methods predicated on linear and uniform levels
of knowledge and developmental progression are back in force. Such practices and
methods have met with debilitating and crippling criticism from within the profession
(see the essays in Hogan-Brun et al. 2009; also Spotti 2011); yet they remain
unaffected and attract more and more support among national and supranational
authorities in fields of immigration, labour and education. Something is seriously
wrong there, and this paper can be read as yet another attack on the linguistic and
sociolinguistic assumptions underlying this complex of tests and models.
In the next section, we will summarize the most important developments in our
understanding of the structure of contemporary societies. Armed with these insights,
we will set out to describe patterns of learning the means of language. Such
patterns, we will argue, are widely different in nature and in technology, they range
from highly formal modes of patterned learning to highly informal and ephemeral
encounters with language. These different modes of learning and acquiring lead
to different forms of knowledge, and this is the topic of the next section. We will
consider the repertoires that can emerge from the widely varied modes of learning
and highlight some less expected modes of knowing language as elements of

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repertoires. In a final concluding section, we will connect such repertoires to the

wider historical frame in which they operate: late modernity and its particular forms
of subjectivity. Let us now turn to some central insights which we need to take on
board in this exercise.

SUPERDIVERSITY

Questions of what is shared and not in the field of cultural (including linguistic)
knowledge acquire a particular urgency and relevance in the context of superdiversity.
Superdiversity is a descriptive term, denoting the new dimensions of social, cultural
and linguistic diversity emerging out of post-Cold War migration and mobility patterns
(Vertovec 2007). The new migrations characterizing the post-1991 order in many parts
of the globe, as well as the emergence of mobile global communication systems such as
the internet, have led to extreme degrees of diversity to which the application of notions
such as diaspora, minority, but also community and other basic terms from the
social-scientific register have become increasingly problematic. Ethnic neighborhoods
have turned from relative homogeneity into highly layered and stratified neighborhoods,
where old migrants share spaces with a variety of new migrants now coming from
all parts of the world and involved in far more complex and unpredictable patterns of
migration than the resident and diaspora ones characterizing earlier migration patterns.
And while social life is primarily spent in such local neighborhoods, the internet and
mobile phone afford opportunities to develop and maintain social, cultural, religious,
economic and political practices in other places. Exiled political leaders can remain
influential political actors in their countries of origin, even when they live in Rotterdam,
Marseille or Frankfurt; isolated individuals can maintain intense contacts (and live
social and cultural life) in a transnational network; languages can be used through such
networks as well, while they are absent from everyday communicative practices in the
local neighborhood. In general, most of the normal patterns of social and cultural
conduct that were central in the development of social-scientific theories have now
been complemented with a wide variety of new, abnormal patterns, for which we are
hard pressed to provide adequate accounts.
The impact of superdiversity is therefore paradigmatic: it forces us to see the
new social environments in which we live as characterized by an extremely low
degree of presupposability in terms of identities, patterns of social and cultural
behavior, social and cultural structure, norms and expectations. People can no longer
be straightforwardly associated with particular (national, ethnic, sociocultural)
groups and identities; their meaning-making practices can no longer be presumed
to belong to particular languages and cultures the empirical field has become
extremely complex, and descriptive adequacy has become a challenge for the social
sciences as we know them.
The implications of this for sociolinguistics have been sketched in a growing body
of work (e.g. Blommaert 2010; Creese & Blackledge 2010; Otsuji & Pennycook
2010; Jrgensen et al. 2011; Blommaert & Rampton 2011 provide an overview), and

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they revolve around: (a) an increasing problematization of the notion of language

in its traditional sense shared, bounded, characterized by deep stable structures; (b)
an increasing focus on language as an emergent and dynamic pattern of practices
in which semiotic resources are being used in a particular way often captured
by terms such as languaging, polylingualism and so forth; (c) detaching such
forms of languaging from established associations with particular groups such as
speech communities or cultures; (d) viewing such groups exclusively in terms of
emerging patterns of semiotic behavior with different degrees of stability speech
communities can be big and small, enduring as well as extremely ephemeral, since
they emerge as soon as people establish in practice a pattern of shared indexicalities;
(e) and seeing people as moving through a multitude of such groups in polycentric
social environments characterized by the presence and availability of multiple (but
often stratified) foci of normativity.
All of this is grounded in sociolinguistic and linguistic-anthropological work
(e.g. Silverstein 2004; Agha 2007). It is clear that work on communication in
superdiverse environments is not well served with a priori notions of language,
community, or understanding, but must proceed from observations of actual
usage, and that it must allow for tremendous variability in observation and
interpretation.3 The stability that characterized the established notions of language
can no longer be maintained in light of the intense forms of mixing and blending
occurring in superdiverse communication environments (both in spoken and written
forms of language; for the latter see e.g. Juffermans 2010; Varis & Wang 2011),
and established notions of competence are in need of revision in light of the highly
unequal patterns of distribution of communicative resources resulting in the often
truncated and unfinished character of communication (see e.g. Blommaert 2010,
chapter 4; Kroon, Dong & Blommaert 2011).
In what follows, we shall engage with the paradigmatic challenge of superdiversity
and revisit patterns of language learning and the repertoires that are results of such
learning processes. The attempt is to reconstruct the concept of repertoire in a
descriptively realistic manner, driven by our usage-based focus and attempting to
avoid as much of the traditional linguistic and sociolinguistic biases as possible.

LANGUAGE LEARNING TRAJECTORIES

In superdiverse environments, patterns of learning languages are widely diverse.

Learning is a somewhat uneasy term that requires qualification, and this will
become clear when we review some patterns below. We use the term here for the
broad range of tactics, technologies and mechanisms by means of which specific
language resources become part of someones repertoire. Acquisition is another
candidate as shorthand for this complex of phenomena and processes, but the term
suggests an enduring outcome (resources have been acquired once and for all),
while learning does not (one can unlearn or forget what one has learned). Hence
the pragmatic choice for learning.

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The Biographic Dimension of Repertoires

With the distinction between acquisition and learning, we have already introduced
a major differentiating feature into our discussion: the fact that some effects of
learning are permanent and enduring (e.g. learning the grammatical patterns of a
prominent language in ones repertoire), while others are temporary and dynamic.
Discursive and sociocultural features would typically be temporary and dynamic,
in the sense that their learning patterns closely follow the biography of the person.
When someone is six years old, s/he speaks as a six-year old. At the age of twelve
this pragmatic complex of speech practices has disappeared and has been replaced
by another complex; likewise at the age of eighteen, thirty and sixty: with each stage
of life we learn the modes of communication of that stage of life, and we unlearn
part of the modes characterizing earlier stages. At the age of forty, we cannot speak
as a teenager anymore. We can speak like a teenager, i.e. imitate the speech forms
we observe in teenagers (or remember from our own teenage years); but we cannot
speak as a teenager, deploying the full range of communication resources that define
people as teenagers. At the same age, we cannot yet speak as a very old person
learning these resources will happen later in life. We can speak as a middle-aged
person, and the resources we can deploy define us as such.
This must be kept in mind: the language we know is never finished, so to speak,
and learning language as a linguistic and a sociolinguistic system is not a cumulative
process; it is rather a process of growth, of sequential learning of certain registers,
styles, genres and linguistic varieties while shedding or altering previously existing
ones. Consequently, there is no point in life in which anyone can claim to know all
the resources of a language. Actual knowledge of language, like any aspect of human
development, is dependent on biography. As for other aspects, knowledge of language
can be compared to the size of shoes. Shoes that fit perfectly at the age of twelve do
not fit anymore at the age of thirty both because of the development of ones body
size and because of fashion, style and preference (few of us would feel comfortable
in the types of shoes we wore in the 1970s). Repertoires are individual, biographically
organized complexes of resources, and they follow the rhythms of actual human lives.
This means that repertoires do not develop in a linear fashion. They develop
explosively in some phases of life and gradually in some others. Let us give one
very clear example. A child, typically, experiences an explosion of literacy resources
in the first couple of years of primary schooling. Between the age of six and eight/
nine, a child passes through the intensely difficult exercise of learning how to write
and read (see Kress 1997 for a classic survey and discussion) not just technically
(increasingly not just in longhand but also on a keyboard) but also ideologically, by
attributing particular values to writing and reading achievements the sociocultural
norms of literacy (Collins & Blot 2003). The outcome is that starting (typically)
from scratch, a child learns to write linguistically and sociolinguistically relatively
complex texts, and read large volumes of such texts. Once this revolutionary stage is
over, literacy skills develop more gradually and incrementally. In the same stage of

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life, children learn another vast complex of linguistic and sociolinguistic practices:
school language, the discourse patterns of formal education. S/he learns how to
talk and write as a pupil, and s/he learns how to listen to and read from instructors,
follow up their instructions, and convert them into regimented, ordered forms of
discourse practice. The child learns genres, registers and styles that are specific to
formal educational environments and have hardly any validity outside school think
of Latin, mathematics or physics as a discursive field, for instance. This, too, is a
massive achievement which marks their repertoires for life, allowing more gradual
expansion and development after that.
With every new stage of life we learn new linguistic and sociolinguistic
patterns. Becoming a teenager involves exploring the experiential worlds of love
and relationships, of sexuality, of popular culture and of identity opportunities
that deviate from those preferred and organized by school or parents. Those who
proceed to higher education learn how to speak and write in new ways there, and for
many this period of life coincides with first experiences as someone who lives apart
from his/her parents and has to navigate that new complex world of opportunities
and responsibilities. Becoming an employee in the labour market involves similar
dramatic jumps in learning, as one acquires the discourse patterns of specific
and specialized professions as well as those of a salaried independent person and
consumer, now capable of purchasing expensive items such as cars or a house (and
having to manoeuvre complicated financial, legal and insurance aspects of it).
Becoming a parent likewise induces one into an entire world of new discourses, just
as becoming unemployed, chronically ill, a widow or widower, or a retired person
come with new and highly specific linguistic and sociolinguistic resources.

Learning by Degree

We learn all of these new skills and resources in a variety of ways. The most visible
ways are those of formal learning environments: school and college, but also formal
training sessions, evening courses, self-study on the basis of a set curriculum,
and so on. Such formal patterns of learning result in particular forms of skills and
resources: uniformly distributed ones over the collective of students who participate
in the same learning environment, regimented and normatively elaborated, often
also with a high degree of self-awareness that this is knowledge (as in I learned
German at school). Such formal patterns of learning always go hand in hand with
patterns of learning in informal learning environments the family, peer groups,
media and popular culture or just life experiences. Acquiring specific registers in
adolescent and adult life is only partly an effect of formal learning; it is more often
an effect of having acquired access to certain communities and groups in society
from Metallica fans to computer engineers in a telecom business, or from parents
of young children to victims of a car accident, or from Catholic priests to Chinese
professional colleagues and having been exposed to the specific discourse patterns
valid in such communities and groups.

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Naturally, the internet has become a tremendously influential provider for such
informal learning environments over the past couple of decades.
Evidently, this vast range of ways in which people come across linguistic and
sociolinguistic resources leads to an equally vast range of modes of learning. Let us
highlight just a few, aware that the vocabulary we must use for describing certain
phenomena lacks clarity and precision.

Comprehensive language learning. Full socialization across a lifetime in a language,

including having access to the formal learning environments for such language
skills and resources as well as having access to a wide range of informal learning
environments will lead to a maximal set of resources: different language varieties,
different genres, styles and registers, distributed over oral as well as literate modes of
production and reception, and dynamic in the sense that one is capable to rapidly learn
new forms and patterns the gradual expansion and overhaul of ones repertoire.

Specialized language learning. Particular stages of life come with access to

specific and specialized skills and resources. Becoming a university student, for
instance, comes with access to technical and specialized registers, genres and styles
(e.g. the academic essay or thesis), whose validity is entirely restricted to that part
of life and that specific environment. For people all over the world, becoming
immersed in the academic environment increasingly means that they learn such
specialized skills and resources in different varieties of academic English. Parts of
any multilingual repertoire, consequently, will often be specialized in the sense
used here: one can be fluent and articulate in academic genres and registers in
English, but not in the genres and registers of everyday life outside of academia (e.g.
those valid in supermarkets or in a medical doctors office).
Those two patterns of learning we would consider to be profound and enduring; the
second type usually is nested in the first one, as one specific pattern of socialization
encapsulated in more general patterns of socialization. They account for what Hymes
(1972b and 1992) understood by communicative competence: the capacity to be a
full social being in the communities in which one spends ones life; the capacity for
voice, i.e. to make oneself understood by others in line with ones own intensions,
desires and ambitions, and this in a wide range of social arenas (Hymes 1996). When
we see people as fully integrated members of some group, it is because they have
acquired such elaborate forms of language skills and resources.
Apart from those elaborate patterns of learning, however, we need to consider
a number of others: more ephemeral and restricted ones. Let us turn to some such
patterns.

Encounters with language. In the context of globalization, people and linguistic

resources are mobile; consequently, one can come across particular bits of language,
learn them in particular ways, and use them. In contrast to the two previously
mentioned modes of learning, we are facing minimal modes of learning here:

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we learn very small bits of language, not the elaborate sets of genres, styles and
registers we discussed above. Let us survey some of them; they may illustrate what
is undoubtedly a much broader range of minimal forms of language learning.

Age-group slang learning. In particular stages of life, people pick up particular bits
of language that typify and identify them as members of age groups, professional
groups and so on. Thus, most middle-aged people still have a repertoire of dirty
words, obscenities and obscure slang expressions learned during adolescence.
Together they amount to a whole discourse system, to be used in particular
social arenas with peer group members and an occasional outsider. While such
complexes define particular stages in life, they tend to become less frequently
used in later stages of life and ultimately live on as an obsolete, anachronistic
discourse system.
Temporary language learning. People who frequently travel often learn small bits
of the local languages, sometimes sufficient to conduct very short conversations
within specific genres (e.g. ordering a meal in a restaurant or saying that you
dont speak or understand the others language), to perform more elaborate
greeting rituals or engage in some minimal form of social bonding with local
people. Often, such learned skills and resources do not survive; they are gradually
forgotten and disappear from ones repertoire. Yet they were learned and were
part of someones repertoires at some point in time.
Single word learning. Many of us know single words from languages we otherwise
do not speak, write or understand. Isolated greeting formulae from different
languages would very often feature in the repertoire of many people: sayonara
and konnichi wa? from Japanese, ni hao from Chinese, shalom from Hebrew,
salem aleikum from Arabic, ciao from Italian, karibu from Swahili, and even
aloha from Hawaiian: they all belong to a globalized vocabulary known to large
numbers of people. Similarly, terms related to the use of food or drinks (salud!,
sant!, Gesundheit!, nazdrovje!, bon apptit), expressions for yes or no
(njet!, Jawohl!) or curses and insults (cojones!, hijo de puta, cornuto,
merde, asshole, sucker, Schweinhund, etc.) are widely available candidates
for single-word learning. The point is that such terms are often the only words we
know in some language, but that they nevertheless represent a minimal form of
learning and a minimal form of knowledge. It is not as if we dont know these
words.
Recognizing language. There are many languages we do not actively use or
understand, but which we are nevertheless able to recognize and identify, either
on the basis of sound or on the basis of script. Thus, many people in Western
Europe would recognize Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic and Greek scripts, even if they
are not able to read texts written in that script. Some may even recognize Thai or
Amharic script, and many would recognize the particular visual image of Finnish
and French in writing. Similarly, people who live in immigrant neighborhoods
may be able to tell the language people are speaking, even if they dont understand

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these languages: these people are speaking Turkish, others Russian, others
German, others Arabic. Recognizing language is the effect of a learning process
typically an informal one and it results in the capacity to identify people,
social arenas and practices, even if one is not able to fully participate in such
practices. It is again a minimal form of language knowledge which goes hand
in hand with social knowledge. Recognizing someone as a speaker of Turkish
involves identifying that person as a Turkish person, and it triggers a world of
ideas and perceptions: ideas about Turkish people, about their religion, culture
and presence in a particular place; insertion into widely circulating discourses
on multiculturalism, Islam, the wearing of the veil, and so forth. Recognizing
language is an important emblematic process in which language projects social,
cultural, ethnic and political categories and social and spatial demarcations
(recognizing Hebrew writing, for instance, can make one realize that one has
entered a Jewish neighborhood). Minimal knowledge of language here connects
to maximum knowledge of society.

The first two modes surveyed above are transitory patterns of language learning:
bits of language(s) are learned but lose active, practical deployability after some
time. The two latter ones are usually not seen as language learning, either
because of the extremely small amounts of language learned, or because no active
competence in the language has been acquired. Yet in all of these cases, such bits
of language are part of our repertoires; they document moments or periods in our
lives when we encountered language(s). Encounters with language account for the
otherwise inexplicable fact that we often know more languages than we would
usually acknowledge or be aware of; that we recognize sometimes very alien forms
of language; that we achieve particular small communicative routines without ever
having been deeply immersed in the language or having gone through an elaborate
formal training and learning process.

Embedded language learning. We sometimes learn bits of language that can only
be used if another language is used as well. Thus, there are forms of learning in which
the finality of learning is to perform code-switching in an appropriate way. Computer-
related terminology is often a case in point: all over the world, English vocabulary
associated with the use of computers would be used as an embedded vocabulary in
discourses conducted in other languages (Dutch IT engineers, consequently, would
speak Dutch with English vocabulary embedded). The school languages that are
not studied for achieving productive fluency in them think of Latin and Greek,
but increasingly also German and French in Europe would typically be languages
that only exist as embedded parts of instructional discourses in another language.
A Dutch secondary school student learning Latin would use Latin only as part of
Dutch instructional discourses, consequently. One can also think of hobby activities
that involve exposure to other-language vocabulary: Yoga, Feng Shui, Karate, but
also Italian or Oriental cooking would produce discourses in one language dotted

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by specific terms or expressions from another language. Thus people practicing

Japanese martial arts would go to the dojo for practice and would listen to their
sensei calling mate! even when that sensei is a full-blooded Antwerp native who
has no competence whatsoever in Japanese beyond the specialised register of the
sport s/he practices. Note that such specialized embedded bits of language can be
quite large, running into dozens if not hundreds of expressions. These bits, however,
do not make up a language in the sense of an autonomously functioning set of
resources, they always need scaffolding from another language.
The minor forms of language learning typically occur in informal learning
environments: through everyday social contacts with others, travelling, media,
internet use, peer group memberships, exposure to popular culture, and so forth.
When such forms of learning coincide with formal learning programs, as with
school languages, we see the emergence of different, specific registers across the
range of languages learned school languages become polycentric sociolinguistic
objects whenever they are taken out of school and used to poke fun at each other
or to imitate teachers and stereotypical characters associated with the language. This
was the case with the Deutsch Rampton (2006) observed in UK schools, where
pupils used bits of school German to bark commands at each other. An imagery of
Second-World War Nazi stereotypes was never far away, and the pupils drew on
this rich indexical source by turning school German into an emblematic resource
for playful brutality and oppressiveness. The same thing happens when language
material from outside school is brought into schools and blended with the formally
learned bits as when the formally learned RP accent in school English is replaced
by a cooler American accent in the schoolyard; or when a degree of competence in
school English is used as a platform to experiment with alternative forms of writing,
as in boyz or cu@4 ; or when children in a Barbadian classroom get reprimanded
by their teacher for inserting Rasta slang into their speech (Van der Aa 2012).
Formally and informally learned language and literacy resources merge into
repertoires, and such repertoires reflect the polycentricity of the learning environments
in which the speaker dwells. The precise functions of such resources can only
be determined ethnographically, i.e. from within the group of users, from below.
Thus, as every parent knows, it is by no means a given that the most normatively
regimented varieties of languages correct school varieties, in other words carry
most prestige and operate as a yardstick for social interaction. The specific blend
of different bits of language the fusion of grammatical correctness (acquired in
a formal learning environment) with fluency in an adolescent slang (derived from
informal learning environments), for instance provides the actual resources
deployed by people. Evidently, such resources (or features, Jrgensen et al. 2011)
can be part of what is conventionally defined as one language Dutch, English,
German but they may also be derived from a variety of conventionally defined
languages. The repertoires of people absorb whatever comes their way as a useful
practical and/or pleasant resource, as long as such resources are accessible to them.
The complexity of polycentric learning environments (something that escalates as

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an effect of the growing importance of new media, as mentioned earlier) ensures

that new markets for linguistic resources become accessible: linguistic resources
that were until recently almost exclusively accessible through formal education (e.g.
normative varieties of English) now become available through a multitude of other,
often more democratically organized channels (see e.g. Blommaert 2010, chapters
2 and 6; Block 2012).
This creates complex and layered repertoires; at the same time, it raises a
wide variety of issues regarding normativity and stratification in the social
use of language. While some resources (e.g. HipHop English) have become
democratically distributed resources, the normative varieties of English remain
accessible only through access to exclusive learning environments. This also
counts for literacy resources: whereas literacy historically was intimately tied to
access to formal schooling, we see that alternative literacies (such as cu@4) can
be easily and quickly learned through informal learning trajectories (Velghe 2011).
This democratization of access to literacy resources has, however, not removed
the hierarchy between correct and incorrect writing: it has highlighted and
emphasized it. The expansion of the modes of language learning has not resulted in
a more egalitarian field of language learning; it has led (and is leading) to increased
stratification and polycentricity.

KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE(S)

We have seen that repertoires are the result of polycentric learning experiences; we
have also seen that they involve a range of learning trajectories, from maximally
formal to extremely informal in fact, that we often learn bits of language(s) without
being aware of it; and we have seen that they involve a range of learning outcomes,
from full active and practical competence down to a level where language(s) are
just recognizable emblems of social categories and spaces, a form of learning that
does not require any active and practical competence. All of those very different
resources are part of our repertoires, and all of them have or can acquire a multitude
of functions.
Let us now turn to someones actual repertoire. For the sake of argument, we shall
discuss the repertoire of the first author of this paper. Pending the development of a
more accurate vocabulary, we shall be compelled to list languages as named entities
and to group oral and literacy skills. The categorizations we will have to use in this
exercise are necessarily clumsy and inadequate; we hope to give an impression,
though, of the diverse and layered structure of a repertoire. We shall also describe
the synchronic repertoire, i.e. the resources that are active in our subjects repertoire
at present; past temporary language resources will not be listed (our subject learned,
e.g., particular bits of several African languages in the course of his life, but cannot
claim any active competence in those languages now).
We shall proceed in three stages: first we shall list the different languages from
which particular resources have entered the repertoire, after which we shall attempt

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to introduce distinctions in the actual skills and competences they involve. Finally,
we shall comment on the biographical basis of this repertoire.

Thirty-Eight Languages

Let us distinguish between four large categories of competence the actual practices
and skills enabled by the resources we shall list.

(a) The first level would be maximum competence: oral as well as literacy
skills distributed over a variety of genres, registers and styles, both productively
(speaking and writing skills) and receptively (understanding oral and written
messages), and in formal as well as informal social arenas. Resources from
two languages qualify for inclusion here: Dutch and English. Note that in both
languages, our subject would also be competent in at least some intra-language
varieties. In Dutch, several regional dialects and slang codes are known; and
English covers (at least receptive) competence in different kinds of regional UK
and US English, different international (world) accents, some Pidgin and Creole
varieties of English, and specialized varieties such as Rasta slang and HipHop
slang.
(b) The second level would be partial competence: there are very well developed
skills, but they do not cover the broad span that characterized the first category,
of genres, registers, styles, production and reception, and formal and informal
social arenas. Thus, our subject can read relatively complex texts, but not write
similar texts; he can understand most of the spoken varieties but not make himself
understood in speaking them; or he can use the language resources rather fluently
as an embedded language in another one. Six languages qualify for inclusion
here: French, German, Afrikaans, Spanish, Swahili and Latin. Knowledge of
intra-language varieties is minimal here (our subject would be able to recognize
various regional varieties of French but not of German, for instance).
(c) The next level is minimal competence: our subject can adequately produce
and/or understand a limited number of messages from certain languages, confined
to a very restricted range of genres and social domains: shopping routines, basic
conversational routines and stock expressions. Eight languages qualify: Japanese,
Chinese, Italian, Greek, Finnish, Russian, Portuguese, Lingala.
(d) Finally, there is recognizing competence. Obviously our subject is able to
recognize all the languages listed in the three previous categories; the fourth
category, however, lists languages in which our subject has only recognizing
competence. The list is quite long: Turkish, Arabic, Korean, Northern Sami,
Gaelic, Berber, Polish, Albanian, Hungarian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew,
Yiddish, Schwytserttsch, Xhosa, Zulu, Gikuyu, Yoruba, Amharic, Thai, Tibetan,
Tamil. We count twenty-two languages in which our subject can recognize sounds
and/or scripts.

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 SUPERDIVERSE REPERTOIRES AND THE INDIVIDUAL

We see that our subjects repertoire combines resources from thirty-eight languages.
These resources are very unevenly distributed, as we know, and while some
resources allow him versatility and choice in a broad range of social contexts, others
offer him only the barest minima of access and uptake. All of these resources all
of them have their places and functions however, and all of them reflect particular
itineraries of learning during specific stages of life and in particular places and
learning environments. Let us have a look at these functions.

Competence Detailed

When we look at what our subject is really capable of doing with these resources, the
picture becomes extremely complex. If we divide the broad notion of competence
over a number of concrete parameters that reflect the capacity to perform actual
practices and the different social domains in which they can be practised, we
notice that the resources of each language listed above are differently distributed
and functionally allocated within the repertoire. Someones actual competence so
becomes a patchwork of skills, some overlapping and some complementary, with
lots of gaps between them. While our subject obviously has a broad and diverse
range of resources in his repertoire, there is no point at which he can be said to be
capable to perform every possible act of language. Some of the resources offer a
general and multigeneric competence, while others are extremely specialized and
only occur in rigidly delineated contexts.
We will turn to the former in a moment; an example of the latter would be Latin,
listed above under partial competence. Our subject can adequately deploy a broad
range of Latin linguistic resources (his Latin is good, as one says in everyday
parlance), but only and exclusively as an embedded language couched in Dutch
instructional discourse. The Latin he knows is his own old school Latin a specific
register structured along lines of translation and grammatical analysis which is
nowadays deployed only when he coaches and supervises his childrens (and their
friends) learning of school Latin. It is not as if he does not know Latin the
knowledge of Latin, however, is confined to a particular generic space and tied to
a very small range of communicative events (explaining and teaching Latin by
means of Dutch instructional discourse). Latin is a highly specialized resource in
his repertoire, and is not used autonomously but always in synergy with another
language.
Let us now move to two other languages listed in the same category: French and
German. We will see that, compared to Latin, those two languages offer an entirely
different range of competences to our subject; we shall also see that even between
these two there are major differences in the distribution of actual competences,
which are an effect of the different trajectories by means of which they entered our
subjects repertoire.

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J. BLOMMAERT & A. BACKUS

Let us first consider French:

Table 1. Distribution of competences (French)

French Spoken production Spoken reception Written Written

production reception
Formal Restricted: not able Advanced: Absent: not Advanced:
to give a formal capable of able to write able to read
speech or lecture understanding formal genres in most formal
without preparation most formal French genres in
and scripting; partial genres in French French
access to courtesy
and politeness
norms; partial access
to sophisticated
registers

Informal Advanced: capable of Advanced: able Average: Advanced:

having conversations to understand able to write able to read
on a wide range of most informal some informal most informal
topics in a vernacular spoken messages texts (e.g. messages
variety of French in French, email) without in French,
including some assistance including
regional and some regional
slang varieties and slang
varieties

And let us now compare this to German:

Table 2. Distribution of competences (German)

German Spoken production Spoken reception Written Written

production reception

Formal Absent: not able Average: able to Absent: not Advanced:

to produce formal understand most able to produce able to read
speech formal speech formal written most formal
genres in German text text genres

Informal Very restricted: only Average: able to Absent: not Average:

simple routines and understand most able to produce able to read
responses spoken Standard informal most informal
varieties of written text Standard
German varieties of
text

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 SUPERDIVERSE REPERTOIRES AND THE INDIVIDUAL

While both languages were listed under partial competence above, we now see
that the actual parts in which our subject has real competence differ substantially.
Our subject has hardly any real competence in the production of spoken and
written German; while he has some competences in the production of French.
Note, however, that (a) these productive competences in French are by and large
confined to informal domains, and (b) that his productive competence in spoken
French is restricted to the use of a vernacular variety whenever he speaks French,
he speaks a distinct Belgian variety of it, influenced by the Brussels dialect as
well as by a Flemish-Dutch accent. Notwithstanding these restrictions, it is not
unlikely that French interlocutors who encounter our subject informally and have a
chat with him may find him relatively fluent in French. This fluency is generically
and sociolinguistically restricted it is a truncated competence (Blommaert et
al. 2005; Blommaert 2010, chapter 4). That means that this competence is not
generative: fluency in these informal conversations does not automatically imply
fluency in other genres and social domains; competence in one sociolinguistic
area does not imply fluency in any other area, nor can it a priori be seen as an
engine for acquiring such fluency. Competences are as a rule sociolinguistically
specific (a point very often overlooked by language teachers). They cluster around
particular social arenas and become generative in those arenas (a process called
enregisterment: Agha 2007; Silverstein 2004), but have no automatic applicability
outside of them.
Apart from these important differences, we notice similarities. Receptive
competences of our subject are present in both French and German, even if the
receptive competences in French are more advanced than those in German. Our
subject can thus perform with relative adequacy the roles of listener and reader in both
languages, even if listening to vernacular varieties of German can be challenging.
In actual interaction events, this unevenly distributed competence receptive
competence without productive competence can give rise to various kinds of
surprises, misjudgments and misunderstandings, as when German interlocutors are
surprised that a very well understood German question is answered in English, not
German; or when Francophone colleagues assume that our subject can adequately
lecture in French because they have unproblematic informal conversations with him
(or, even worse, believe that his conversational fluency indicates that he can write
academic papers in French).
A full and comprehensive survey of what our subject can actually do with his
repertoire would of course require an analysis of every particular resource in his
repertoire an exercise we cannot contemplate in this paper. The point should be
clear, however: all the elements that together compose the repertoire are functionally
organized, and no two resources will have the same range and potential. A repertoire
is composed of a myriad of different communicative tools, with different degrees of
functional specialization. No single resource is a communicative panacea; none is
useless.

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J. BLOMMAERT & A. BACKUS

Repertoires as Indexical Biographies

How did these different resources enter into our subjects repertoire? Let us have a
look at the very different trajectories we have to review here.

Vernacular Dutch is our subjects first language his mother tongue or L1

as it is usually called. His first speaking skills were gathered through common
socialization processes, and they were composed of a local dialect. This dialect
stayed with him for the remainder of his life, even though the communicative
network within which he could deploy it shrunk dramatically in the course of his
life. His family moved to Brussels when he was eleven; the initial social world
of dialect was replaced by another one, now dominated by a vernacular variety
of Standard Dutch with a distinct Brussels regional influence. These dialect
backgrounds account for the distinct accent he has when speaking Standard
Dutch (and every other language, for that matter). Currently, dialect is exclusively
used in a tiny family network, and only in informal domains. The dialect never
developed into adult repertoires nor into specialized professional repertoires;
consequently the range of social roles which our subject can assume through that
dialect is very limited.
Note that the L1 was a dialect (or a complex of dialects); Standard Dutch as well
as French, German and English, but also Latin and Greek were school languages.
The fact that they were school languages accounts for the fact that some Latin
and Greek never really transcended the level of school competences: the
capacity to translate a fixed body of texts and to perform in depth grammatical
analysis of them; accompanied in the initial stages of formal learning by a modest
capacity to speak and write French, German and English and a well developed
capacity to read formal texts in those languages. Swahili was the language in
which our subject specialized during his student years. It is in a sense also a
school language: he acquired the school competences mentioned earlier and a
modest productive and receptive competence in formal Standard Swahili. Part of
the training he followed also included an introduction to Arabic and Yoruba, the
results of which were later shrunk to the recognizing language level.
Some of these school languages, however, acquired a life after and outside school
in complementary informal learning environments. Growing up in Brussels as a
teenager meant that our subject picked up local vernacular and informal varieties
of French. This accounts for his present conversational fluency in informal
domains. Our subject, however, never found himself in formal social domains
where French was the code, so that part of competence never developed fully.
During his student years, texts in English, French and German belonged to the
mandatory readings in African Studies, as well as a modest amount of texts in
Spanish and Portuguese. This accounts for the fact that reading formal texts poses
little problems in English, French and German. And finally, advanced studies
made our subject enter the world of academic English, which became the code for

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 SUPERDIVERSE REPERTOIRES AND THE INDIVIDUAL

formal speaking and writing in the academic field, as well as for a certain amount
of informal social skills. These competences are consequently highly developed.
Swahili, finally, broadened and deepened as our subject further specialized in that
language, made numerous fieldwork trips documenting urban vernaculars, and
eventually did some language teaching in Swahili.
Our subject learned several languages in a purely informal learning environment.
Bits of Spanish were learned by attempts to read Nerudas poetry, later
complemented by reading some academic works in Spanish; bits of Italian
through an interest in Italian cinema and mediated by competences in Latin
and French; bits of Russian through reading a Teach Yourself booklet; some
contemporary Greek mediated through the Ancient Greek learned at school;
Lingala by social contacts with Congolese friends and colleagues; Finnish by
a two-year visiting appointment in Finland; Afrikaans by frequent contacts
with South African colleagues and by fieldwork in an Afrikaans-dominant area;
isiXhosa and Northern Sami also through fieldwork exposure.
Travelling was a major source of new language material, and almost all of the
languages listed above were at some point or another also languages of the
travelling destinations of our subject. Japanese and Chinese entered the repertoire
exclusively through travelling, later complemented by personal contacts with
friends and colleagues. The recognizing competence for languages such as
Tibetan, Serbo-Croatian and Schwytserttsch is also an effect of travelling.
Life in the neighborhood, finally, is the origin for much of what is listed under
recognizing competence. Our subject lives in a super-diverse inner-city
neighborhood, where e.g. Turkish, Arabic, Berber, Polish, Russian, Albanian,
Thai, Czech, Tamil, Hebrew and Yiddish are frequently used and publicly
displayed. The lingua franca of the neighborhood is a truncated form of
vernacular Dutch; hence the superficial competence in the languages of the local
immigrants: they are a social and cultural compass that guides our subject in
identifying interlocutors in his neighborhood.

We can see how the particular synchronic competences we reviewed in the previous
section have their historical roots in the distinct ways in which they arrived to
him or in which he arrived to them the roots are routes, so to speak. Each of the
resources was learned in the context of specific life spans, in specific social arenas,
with specific tasks, needs and objectives defined, and with specific interlocutors.
This is why our subject can seem very fluent when he speaks or writes on academic
topics in English, while he can be extremely inarticulate when he has to visit a
medical doctor, a lawyer, grocer or a plumber in the UK or the US. It is also why
he can chat in vernacular French but not lecture in it, why he can read German but
not write it, and distinguish between Turkish and Yiddish without understanding a
word of either language. And of course, this is why certain resources did not survive
in the repertoire. Our subject had to devote a considerable amount of time studying
Tshiluba as a student; not a fragment of that language survived in the repertoire.

27
J. BLOMMAERT & A. BACKUS

The course was entirely unexciting, the exam requirements undemanding, and the
opportunities to practise the language nil, the more since he and his fellow students
discovered humiliatingly that no Congolese actually spoke the kind of Tshiluba their
1950s missionary-authored textbook offered them.
Each of these trajectories all of them unique contribute more than just
linguistic material to ones repertoire. They contribute the potential to perform
certain social roles, inhabit certain identities, be seen in a particular way by others
(e.g. an articulate or inarticulate person, as in the example of informal versus formal
French), and so on. The resources that enter into a repertoire are indexical resources,
language materials that enable us to produce more than just linguistic meaning but
to produce images of ourself, pointing interlocutors towards the frames in which
we want our meanings to be put. Repertoires are thus indexical biographies, and
analyzing repertoires amounts to analyzing the social and cultural itineraries
followed by people, how they manoeuvred and navigated them, and how they placed
themselves into the various social arenas they inhabited or visited in their lives.

LATE-MODERN REPERTOIRES AND SUBJECTS

Let us by way of conclusion recapitulate what we intended to achieve in this paper.

We set out to describe patterns of learning the means of language, taken here in
their broadest sense as every bit of language we accumulate and can deploy at a
given point in life. Such patterns, we argued, are widely different in nature and
in technology, ranging from highly formal modes of patterned learning to highly
informal and ephemeral encounters with language. These different modes of
learning lead to different forms of knowledge of language, and while the diversity
of such modes of language is tremendous, we must accept that all of them matter
for the people who have learned them. None of them is trivial or unimportant. Even
more, we can see how a subject constituted him- or herself by analysing the indexical
biographies that are contained in the spectre of language resources they can deploy.
The relevance of the latter point should be clear. While earlier authors on repertoire
emphasized the connection between (socio-)linguistic resources, knowledge and
communities, we shift the direction from communities towards individual subjects.
We have explained the rationale for that above: superdiversity compels us to
abandon any preconceived and presumed stable or absolute notion of community,
and replace them with a more fluid view of networks, knowledge communities and
communities of practice all of them dynamic, in the sense that most of them are
peculiar to particular stages of life, and those that persist through life (as e.g. the
family or regional forms of memberships) change in shape and value during ones
lifetime. Repertoires in a superdiverse world are records of mobility: of movement
of people, language resources, social arenas, technologies of learning and learning
environments. A relevant concept of repertoires needs to account for these patterns
of mobility, for these patterns construct and constitute contemporary late-modern
subjects.

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 SUPERDIVERSE REPERTOIRES AND THE INDIVIDUAL

Community is not the only notion we have to revisit; the same counts for
language. We have repeatedly flagged the uneasiness of our own vocabulary in
describing the repertoires of contemporary subjects; the fact is that we all carry the
legacy of modernist hegemonies of language and society, and that an important part
of our task consists of redesigning the analytical instruments by means of which we
proceed. If we look back at our subjects repertoire, we have seen that no less that
thirty-eight languages are represented there. Yet, of course, none of these languages
is in any realistic sense complete or finished: all of them are partial, truncated,
specialized to differing degrees, and above all dynamic. This also counts for the
mother tongue, that mythical finished-state language spoken by the native speaker
of language-learning literature. The Dutch now spoken by our subject is different
from the Dutch he spoke at the age of eight or of eighteen, not just linguistically but
also sociolinguistically. He still occasionally uses his dialect, but since this dialect
lost its broad social scope of application due to migration at the age of eleven, it
never developed any of the registers of adult life: the register of relationships and
sexuality, of parenthood, of money, death, cars and work. Whenever our subject
speaks his dialect, he can only speak it from within two social roles: that of the son
of his mother and the brother of his sisters. He can no longer use it adequately during
infrequent encounters with childhood friends or relatives the dialect does not allow
him the voice he wants and needs in that stage of life and that social arena. The
repertoires change all the time, because they follow and document the biographies
of the ones who use them. In that sense, repertoires are the real language we have
and can deploy in social life: biographically assembled patchworks of functionally
distributed communicative resources.
As for our subject: the thirty-eight languages he has assembled throughout his
life may put him on the high side in terms of scope of repertoire. His life is that of
a mobile subject, someone who travels extensively and whose basis the locality
where most of his life is organized is itself deeply coloured by globalized mobility.
While he may be seen as an exception, we may as well see his repertoire as unique
a unique reflex of a unique biography. But when similar exercises would be applied
to other subjects, surprising results could be obtained even among biographically
more average subjects. We tend to underestimate the degree to which our lives
develop along trajectories of mobility, in which we encounter, leave, learn and
unlearn social and cultural forms of knowledge (such as languages) because we need
to be able to make sense of ourselves. In that sense, we can see structure, or at least
pattern in repertoires that are otherwise entirely unique. The structures and patterns
are dynamic and adaptable, while they are driven by shared motives and intentions:
to make sense, to have voice wherever we are.
There is an angle to this that merits exploration. Voice, as we know, is subject
to normative judgment one has voice when someone else ratifies it as such. In
that sense, our subjects repertoire is a complex of traces of power: a collection of
resources our subject had to accumulate and learn in order to make sense to others,
that is, in order to operate within the norms and expectations that govern social life

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in the many niches in which he dwelled and through which he passed. The elements
of the repertoire are resources he needed to deploy, practices he had to perform, in
order to be normal in the polycentric and dynamic world in which he lived. We
have here a very Foucaultian view of the subject: the subject as an outcome of power,
as a complex of features of self-disciplining, as a subject perpetually subjected to
regimes of normality.
Thus conceived, repertoires invite a new form of analysis. No longer seen as
the static, synchronic property of a speech community, we can now approach it
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. Repertoires enable
us to document in great detail the trajectories followed by people throughout their
lives: the opportunities, constraints and inequalities they were facing, the learning
environments they had access to (and those they did not have access to), their
movement across physical and social space, their potential for voice in particular
social arenas. We can now do all of this in significant detail, because we are no longer
trapped by a priori conceptions of language, knowledge and community. Or are
we? We noted in our introduction the increasing predominance of purely modernist
technologies of language measurement through uniform testing. Such practices
have become a central element of administrative and bureaucratic apparatuses all
over the world, and they operate with exceptional power in fields such as education,
labour and migration. The Common European Framework for Languages has in a
very short time become an industry standard for measuring language competence
far beyond Europe, and it is applied as an objective tool for measuring progress in
language learning, the benchmarking and accreditation of language experts such as
teachers and interpreters, the readiness to integrate of new immigrants as well as
the degree of integration of recent residents.
We do not believe that we have to engage in a lengthy comparison and critique of
the assumptions underlying such standardized language measuring tools; we believe
our critique of them should be clear from the way we addressed repertoires here.
The conclusion of our critique is therefore obvious: such measuring instruments
are a form of science fiction. They have only a distant and partial connection with
(specific parts of) the real competences of people, the way they are organized in actual
repertoires, and the real possibilities they offer for communication. If we apply the
Common European Framework levels for language proficiency, our subject would
undoubtedly score a C2 the most advanced level of proficiency for English,
when the language test concentrates on academic genres of text and talk. The same
subject, however, would score A2 the most elementary level of proficiency if the
test were based on how he would interact with a medical doctor, a plumber, an IT
helpdesk operative, an insurance broker, and so on. So, how good is his English
then? Let it be clear that this question can only be appropriately answered with
another one: which English?

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 SUPERDIVERSE REPERTOIRES AND THE INDIVIDUAL

NOTES
1
This paper grew out of discussions within the Max Planck Sociolinguistic Diversity Working Group.
A preliminary version was presented at a colloquium on sociolinguistic superdiversity held at the Max
Planck Institute for Ethnic and Religious Diversity, Gttingen, November 2010, as a plenary lecture
at the 32nd Ethnography in Education Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, February 2011 and as
a lecture in the series The Future of Educational Studies, University of Luxemburg, September 2011.
We are grateful for the comments provided by audiences at all of these occasions, in particular those
of Jens-Normann Jrgensen, whose incisive comments greatly improved the argument in this paper.
This paper draws extensively on a broader-aimed one, Blommaert and Backus (2011), and anticipates
further developments in this direction.
2
The other key notions, in contrast, did attract a considerable amount of theoretical reflection. Hymes
himself questioned the idea of isolated and closed speech communities in his essay on the concept of
tribe (Hymes 1968); more recent critiques of the traditional concept of speech communities include
Rampton (1998). Blommaert (2005 and 2010) announced the crucial role of repertoires in further
work and spelled out its potential relevance.
3
In Blommaert & Backus (2011), we examine the compatibility of these insights with recent
developments in usage-based linguistics.

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Jan Blommaert
University of Tilburg

Ad Backus
University of Tilburg

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