Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

532 Part 6: Language and Interaction
she is addressing (her small-town parents back home). Similarly, Seba
does not care about linguistic purity at home, but rather calls on ‘all
the languages . . . mixed together’. In many situations speaking textbook-like
English would be communicatively disastrous (see also
Sidnell, this volume, on orientations to correctness in the second language
classroom).
(2) One’s repertoires emerge and/or recede according to use and context.
Charlotte Simmons rekindles her ‘home’ register in the letter to her
parents, but fi nds it a struggle to use this language while steeped in
her new academic context. Seba similarly describes how she ‘used to
learn a lot of languages’ but fi nds that now she is mainly just ‘holding
on to Arabic’ (and English) in the United States.
(3) Accommodation to the communicative repertoires of one’s interlocutors is
inevitable, although the directionality of accommodation – or, who accommodates
to whom – varies. Charlotte Simmons, out of respect and deference
to her parents, accommodates to their expectations and
communicative habits (rather than expecting them to accommodate to
her ‘pretty writing’). The Supreme Court justices accommodate to the
higher education repertoire in which they want to fully participate
(rather than asserting the validity of their own Spanish- or Gullahinfl
uenced speech in that context). In radical contrast, Seba sees all of
her languages as allowing her to accommodate to the communicative
needs of her mother (rather than accommodating to an ideology of
linguistic purity or a sense of English as an offi cial language).
(4) What has come to be labeled ‘language’ is just one aspect of a much broader
and communicatively relevant category, ‘communicative repertoire’. All
language users deploy different ways of speaking to different types
of people or in different social situations. While Charlotte Simmons
is discussing different ways of using the ‘same language’, (‘English’),
Seba is discussing different languages that she labels ‘Arabic’,
‘Spanish’, ‘French’ and ‘English’.
What’s useful in each of these cases is not the labeling of distinct
‘languages’, but the recognition that in varied contexts, different
communicative repertoires account for communicative success.
(5) Building metalinguistic awareness of communicative repertoires is a
life-long process, facilitated by travel across social boundaries.
Charlotte Simmons seems to be painfully aware of the contrast
between her ‘pretty language’ and the expectations her parents have
of a letter from her. Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor recognize
the effects their varied repertoires had in shaping their impressions at
elite colleges. Seba displays awareness that her multiple languages
function differently in the United States than they did in Morocco.
Each of these examples illustrates how traversing social boundaries
can create metalinguistic awareness, illuminating the different functionality
of their repertoires.