Taking a “social” approach

• the individual as a social being and its relationship with other micro, meso and macro levels

• Influence of society and social context

• Behavior – impacts others’- behavior, thought processes & emotions

What is a “linguistic repertoire”?

• The linguistic repertoire is the set of skills and knowledge a person has of one or more languages, as
well as their different varieties

• Varieties may be

• diatopic (geographic differences),

• diaphasic (degree of formality),

• diastratic (variation depending on social, cultural or educational factors/social strata) or

• diachronic (change overtime).

• This repertoire comprises elements of the different levels of description of language and its use
(phonetic-graphical, lexical-grammatical, discursive-textual or pragmatic).

• Concerning the use of languages, this repertoire forms the basis of every language
speaker/learner’s plurilingual competence (either current or possible).

According to Blommaert

• we all have a large number of linguistic resources at our disposal, and it does not really make a
difference whether they belong to only one ‘conventionally defined “language”’ or several of them.

• Hence, multilingualism is a matter of degree, a continuum, and since we all use different linguistic
varieties, registers, styles, genres and accents, we are all to a greater or lesser degree multilingual.

According to “Language and youth identity in a multilingual setting: A multimodal repertoire

approach” Anthea Bristowe, Marcelyn Oostendorp & Christine Anthonissen

The participants in this study represent an elite: they are academically successful, ambitious
young people who are being actively encouraged to think critically about themselves and their
environments. While most, if not all, their schooling takes place in English, they not only maintain a
host of other languages, but are intent on acquiring new ones. They use their languages flexibly,
moving confidently from one person or group to another to reconstruct or position themselves. The
participants readily admit that they are not equally proficient in all of the languages they speak, but
this does not appear to be an inhibiting factor. In the absence of formal teaching, they learn from
and teach one another.

Language ideologies
• In the quotation, Blommaert also mentions ‘language ideologies’, i.e. our beliefs about what a
language is (and what multilingualism is), how language works, how it is used.

Weber & Horner (2012) wrote: the question of which resources in people’s repertoires count as
‘languages’ and which do not is a socio-political rather than linguistic one. ‘Multilingualism’ itself is a
rather problematic term because of this underlying assumption of language as a bounded entity
which is countable.

 A heritage language is a minority language (either immigrant or indigenous) learned by its

speakers at home as children, but never fully developed because of insufficient input from
the social environment.
 Heritage speakers are individuals who were raised in homes where a language other than the
dominant community language was used.
 oppressed minorities can sometimes be numerically the majority group: e.g. black people in
apartheid South Africa.
 one and the same language can be the majority language in one social context (e.g. Spanish
in Spain) and a minority language in another (e.g. Spanish in the US).
 Following Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004: 4), the terms ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ are
therefore used ‘not to draw attention to numerical size of particular groups, but to refer to
situational differences in power, rights, and privileges’.

Dominant vs. critical readings

 If the two sets of assumptions seem (to us) to be aligned, we simply go along with the
writer’s assumptions, we allow ourselves to be carried along by them: this is often referred
to in textual criticism as the dominant reading of a text.

• If, on the other hand, there seems (to us) to be a clash between our assumptions and the
assumptions made in or by the text, then we might well begin to ques=on or even reject the later:
this is the resisting or critical reading.

The need for ethnographically based discourse analysis

‘the recording and analysis of a culture or society, usually based on participant-observation and
resulting in a written account of a people, place or institution’ (Simpson & Coleman 2017).

The study of language ideologies and criticality

, they usually involve simplifications, they ‘can do harm by implanting in thought and action unfair,
dismissive, or derogatory assumptions about other people’ (Gee 2005: 72).

• It is therefore important to be aware of when texts rely upon such potentially stereotyped and
discriminatory assumptions and ideologies.

• Blommaert and Verschueren (1998: 25), ideology can be defined as a ‘constella7on of fundamental
or commonsensical, and o>en norma7ve, ideas and attitudes related to some aspect(s) of social
“reality”’.

• Language ideologies are those that relate to language use and structure.

• Because of the potential normative power of ideologies, language ideologies, too, tend to be
imbued with vested interests and can play a role in group membership, boundary nego2a2on, as well
as social inclusion and exclusion.

• Irvine (1989: 255) emphasizes that language ideologies constitute ‘the cultural system of ideas
about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and poli7cal interests