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individual speakers have real options in adopting one variant over another (e.g. dropping the postvocalic /r/ in NYC, using honorific language in those communities that recognize it as a “special” or “separate” register)? To what extent does the behavior of an individual reflect group expectations? Do some individuals (e.g. community leaders, famous artists) have the power to affect the linguistic choices of their community?

As shown by these questions, the notion of repertoire forces researchers to think about a range of issues that are central to the role of language in social life. Although repertoire is different from what is usually understood as “grammar” it makes similar assumptions about norms and expectations. One of its advantages is that it does not have the same presuppositions about “speaking proper.” A repertoire is something that all speakers have, regardless of where they went to school or for how long. At the same time, it is obvious that one’s life experience, including schooling, is a crucial element of one’s repertoire. For researchers, concentrating on repertoire means to select a range of linguistic features, a set of situations, and a speech community.

3.5Speech communities, heteroglossia, and language ideologies

The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower’s failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building, and heaven would have been reached ... Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives. Toni Morrison (1994: 19)

As it will be made clear in the discussion of ethnographic methods in chapter 4, linguistic anthropologists typically do not just work on a language variety but on the language variety (or varieties) spoken in a particular community. In other words, linguistic anthropologists start from the assumption that any notion of language variety presupposes a community of speakers. Such a community is a point of reference for the individuals who use a given variety as much as for the researcher who is interested in documenting such usage.

3.5.1Speech community: from idealization to heteroglossia

Linguistic anthropologists share with sociolinguists the concern for a definition of speech community as a real group of people who share something about the way in which they use language. This concern yields an approach that differs from the one proposed by most formal grammarians, who start from the assumption that the community they work in is homogeneous (Chomsky 1965: 3).

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Homogeneity is an idealization common (although by no means universal) in science: investigation starts with the assumption of order and uniformity. Variation is usually put aside as “exceptions to the rule” or “insignificant.” Locating himself in this tradition, Chomsky assumes that there must be a property of the human mind that allows “a person to acquire a language under conditions of pure and uniform experience” (Chomsky 1986: 17). Only after having established the rules and principles governing such an idealized community, should more complex conditions be introduced and studied. The idealized type of experience mentioned by Chomsky is studied by investigating native speakers’ (often the linguist’s own) intuitions about whether or not a given linguistic form or sentence is acceptable, that is, roughly speaking, whether it “sounds right” (this is different from whether it would be judged acceptable by a school teacher). The English sentences below are an example of this method at work. Three verbs that can take a complement clause – marked by square brackets – starting with what are examined by imagining possible sentences in which they might occur. The examples preceded by an asterisk (*) are the unacceptable ones (from Chomsky 1986: 88):

(1)I asked [what time it is]

(2)I wondered [what time it is]

(3)I (don’t) care [what time it is] (1)’ it was asked what time it is

(2)’ *it was wondered what time it is (3)’ *it was cared what time it is

Acceptability judgments provide the basis for the generalizations made by the linguist about particular grammars. For instance, the fact that only the sentence with the verb ask can be made into an acceptable passive sentence with the verb be (it was asked ...) is used to show that the relationship between the main verb (ask, wonder, and care) and the following complement clause (what time it is) is different for ask as opposed to wonder and care. Whereas ask is a transitive verb, wonder and care are not and therefore the embedded clause starting with what ...

cannot become the subject of the passive verbs was wondered and was cared.8

Such generalizations, in combination with hypotheses about the “underlying” or “deep” structures that might describe such phenomena,9 are used to posit

8Sentences (1)’-(3)’ in fact are not standard passives, otherwise the “subject” clause [what time it is] would be before the main verb, as in

(1)” [what time it is] was asked

This is however a bit odd in English and another rule has been applied to “move” the subject to the end and replace it with the “empty” pronoun it.

9 See chapter 6.

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principles that should apply to all languages (what Chomsky calls “Universal Grammar”).

As shown by the development of formal linguistics from the 1960s on, the use of intuitions on how different words fit into the same pattern has been a very powerful method for quickly producing rules and generalizations about syntactic regularities. But this method encounters some problems when adopted as the main source of information about what it means to know a language or even a small part of it. Labov (1972b: ch. 8) articulated a number of these problems, including the limited range of data available by working on only one’s own or a few informants’ intuitions, the difficulty of having intuitions about variation and its meaning for the speakers, and the theoretical limitations of assuming that differences in intuitions can be resolved by attributing them to different “dialects.” Looking at it from an anthropological perspective, Hymes (1972b) pointed out that the very definition of acceptability is problematic given that to know a language means not only to know what is grammatically acceptable. It also means to know what is socially and culturally acceptable. Again, this kind of information is difficult if not impossible to gain by simply imagining examples or situations. To these objections, formal grammarians often reply that there is a fundamental misunderstanding in this debate. They are talking about a different kind of “language” from the one that is studied by sociolinguists and anthropologists. What formal grammarians are interested in is not a sociopolitical product or process but an abstraction, constructed by the linguist to make hypotheses about the human mind. Chomsky (1986) uses the term “Internalized language” (or “I-lan- guage”) for this kind of construct and distinguishes it from the “Externalized language” (or “E-language) studied by those interested in language use.

It is important to stress that from a sociological and anthropological perspective, the problem with this approach is not idealization per se, but some of its implications and consequences. I will mention here only two problematic areas. The first is the connotations of linguistic purism that a linguistic theory exclusively based on idealization carries. Chomsky (1986: 17) explicitly says that a speech community in which people use a mixture of two languages, e.g. French and Russian, would not be “pure” enough to be an ideal object of study for theoretical linguistics. But this assumption could mean the exclusion of most if not all real communities in the world. All speech communities that have been studied systematically show some degree of linguistic, sociological, and cultural differentiation. Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists believe that there is always some “mixing” whether in the form of two very different varieties (French and English) or in the form of “dialectical” or “stylistic” differentiation (see below the discussion of heteroglossia). Without getting into the negative connotations of the use of the term “pure,” the idealization program in practice means that at

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least for now we should not be studying any community where we perceive a considerable degree of “mixing” or “impurity.” Although this kind of approach is presented as the most rational method, what is left for “later” might never be studied, if all the existing human resources continue to be used for testing and revising models of “pure” communities rather than for considering whether these models can be extended to real life situations where “impure” mixing is the norm. This is indeed what has happened to theoretical linguistics as developed by Chomsky and his students. In forty years of intense research by a group of innovative and highly productive scholars, very little if anything has been said about how to relate the abstract knowledge of the idealized members of “pure” communities to the concrete acts of linguistic performance by people who live in real communities.

It is in the context of this discussion that I see Toni Morrison’s statement (quoted above) as a powerful reminder of the origins of the myth of linguistic purity. Why don’t we use our theoretical stance, our scientific wisdom, to abandon the belief that it would be better and easier if we all spoke the same language, the same dialect, or in the same style? Why don’t we embrace instead the idea that variety is part of human cultures and human nature? Why don’t we accept that there always are contrasting forces in any human aggregate and even within the same individual? Such a recognition would define a different kind of program for the study of humanity, including language. We would start from the assumption that variation is the norm and we would look for ways of documenting it in order to understand language as part of the human condition.

This is what is suggested by the work of many contemporary theorists, including the ones inspired by the work of the Russian linguist, philosopher, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who argued that the linguistic homogeneity assumed by most linguists, philosophers, and philologists is an ideological construction, historically tied to the development of the European states and the efforts to establish a national identity through a national language to be called by one name: German, French, Russian, Italian. Such a unified notion of a language has no necessary relation to real language use. In the reality of everyday life (as well as in the careful work of great artists such as some of the novelists studied by Bakhtin), the speech of any one person is filled by many different voices or linguistically constructed personae, a quality that Bakhtin called raznorecie, a term translated in English as heteroglossia:

At any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word ... but also – and for us this is the essential point – into languages that are socioideological: languages of social groups, “professional” and

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