Linguistic repertoire: South/North trajectories and entanglements

Abstract

ABSTRACT Linguistic repertoire is regarded as one of the foundational concepts of sociolinguistics but despite its prominence during the early years of the discipline, it is commonly believed that for decades scant theoretical development on repertoire occurred. This situation is seen to change in the early 2000s when several (Northern) researchers increasingly advocated that linguistic repertoire could be more productive to theorize contemporary communicative practices than language. In this paper, I aim to foreground the South/North entanglements in the coinage and development of linguistic repertoire and present erased, forgotten, or obscured parts of the linguistic repertoire story. I show how Southern thinkers, both linguists and non-linguists came up with precursors to the way in which repertoires are currently conceptualized. By presenting this obscured narrative from the South, I want to offer critical questions about the trajectories of concepts and the kind of knowledge that gets excluded by the sidelining of Southern thinking.