1 Communicative Repertoire Betsy Rymes The University of Pennsylvania In Handbook of English Language Studies Edited by Brian Street and Constant Leung These days, researchers in Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and Educational Linguistics are increasingly replacing Linguistic Monolith orthodoxies about Language with understandings of any language or other communicative element as part of an individual’s Communicative Repertoire. This chapter discusses how this new approach has emerged from a context of massive mobility and diversity, engendering different kinds of interactions and fostering new understandings of the role of multilingualism in language learning and communication. I conclude by specifically addressing the role of English in a contemporary individual’s communicative repertoire. A Brief History of the Repertoire Perspective Initially, the notion of “repertoire” was a radical concept in linguistics. So, perhaps it makes sense that it emerged in the 1960’s, as some linguists felt bolstered to challenge more purist orthodoxies in the interest of carefully observing social life. During this era, John Gumperz (1964, 1965) began to question linguistic definitions of language. This questioning emerged when he travelled to India to do linguistic research. There, in a context of massive linguistic variety, he found that individuals habitually used many languages in seeming free variation. They simply did not orient to the idea that languages should be used in a “pure” form. In his essay, “Language,” (1965) Gumperz drew on these observations to make the point that terms like “Language X” demarcated a useful category for linguists, but not necessarily for people communicating. When the people in an Indian marketplace, for example, were bargaining with other multilingual merchants, they would strategically call on words and phrases from many different local languages to make a sale or negotiate a bargain. Gumperz’s analysis of the Indian marketplace centered on language and a questioning of linguistic description, and he used the term linguistic repertoire to describe the range of languages circulating in a community. Later in the 1960’s and in the 1970’s, Gumperz took his research even further beyond the goals of decontextualized linguistic description. Seeking to apply his methods for closely examining the nuance of negotiation‐‐methods he developed