Applied Linguistics Advance Access published July 23, 2015

Applied Linguistics 2015: 1–20 ! Oxford University Press 2015

doi:10.1093/applin/amv030

Expanding the Notion of the Linguistic

Repertoire: On the Concept of
Spracherleben—The Lived Experience
of Language

BRIGITTA BUSCH
Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna
E-mail: [email protected]

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The aim of this article is to explore the connections between the concepts of the
linguistic repertoire, of language ideologies, and of lived experience of language.
In foregrounding the concept of Spracherleben, the lived experience of language,
Linguagem em ação/ao vivo
this article contributes to the ongoing debate on how to rethink the notion of the
linguistic repertoire considering that current phenomena such as increased mo-
bility, migration, or participation in transnational networks of communication
make it difficult to take, as Gumperz (1964) did in his original concept, relatively
stable speech communities as point of departure. The notion of the lived experi-
ence of language which I am elaborating here emphasizes the intersubjective
dimension of language as a gesture toward the other and casts light on the often-
neglected bodily and emotional dimensions of perception and speech. Attaching
particular importance to the perspective of the experiencing subject, the concept
is based on phenomenological approaches, as developed in the 1940s by the
French philosopher Merleau-Ponty.

INTRODUCTION
Relocating the center of one’s life, within a country, or from one country or
continent to another, always means a change both in the life world
(Lebenswelt) and in the linguistic environment with whose practices, dis-
courses, and rules one is familiar. Under favorable conditions, this kind
of change can be experienced as a challenge, opening up new horizons
and new opportunities to reinvent oneself as a (speaking) subject. Under less Isso é bacana!
favorable conditions, however, changing location and language can also
be experienced as a hardship or as a source of ongoing emotional stress—
sometimes even leading to traumatization or to re-invoking earlier traumatic
experience. This is particularly likely in cases of forced displacement, and if the
situation after emigration continues to be experienced as precarious, uncer-
tain, or even hostile (Kogan 2005). Nevertheless, the underlying experience
that one’s own linguistic repertoire no longer ‘fits’ is—and this is the central
idea behind this article—one that not only occurs in extreme situations but is
2 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE

shared (though often in a very attenuated form) by all speakers when experi-
encing dislocation.
The question we are concerned with is: what happens when speakers come
from a space where they are familiar with the social rules and the language
practices, and enter a space where this is not the case? We wish to approach
this question in three stages. First, how is their linguistic repertoire constituted,
what linguistic ‘baggage’ do they bring as speakers when they enter the space?
Secondly, how are speakers positioned by discourses about language and ways
of speaking, or by linguistic ideologies that shape the space, and how do they
position themselves in relation to these discourses? And thirdly, with what
feelings and bodily sensations do they experience themselves—through the
eyes and ears of the others—as speakers? I suggest that these questions need

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to be addressed from different perspectives, each of which relates to particular
sets of theoretical assumptions: a third person perspective focussing on how
speakers interact by means of language, a second person perspective focussing
on how they become constituted as speaking subjects through language, and a
first person perspective focussing on how they live language as a subjective
experience. I will argue that these three perspectives which are inspired by an
interactional, a poststructuralist, and a phenomenological approach respect-
ively are not mutually exclusive but can be seen as complementary in a better
understanding of the multilayered and complex nature of the linguistic reper-
toire. The aim of this article is thus to explore the connections between the
concepts of the linguistic repertoire, of linguistic ideologies, and of lived ex-
perience of language.
Taking into account the so far rather neglected question of how speakers—
through emotionally loaded and bodily inscribed experience—‘live’ the lan-
guages and ways of speaking to which they are exposed can have implications
in different fields of applied linguistics, among others in the field of language
learning and second language acquisition, in sociolinguistic research on phe-
nomena such as language attrition and language shift or in the exploration of
multilingual and translingual practices in everyday life.
In foregrounding the concept of Spracherleben,1 the lived experience of lan-
guage, this article contributes to the ongoing debate on how to rethink the
notion of the linguistic repertoire considering that current phenomena such as
increased mobility, migration, or participation in transnational networks of
communication make it difficult to take, as Gumperz (1964) did in his original
conceptualization, relatively stable speech communities as the point of depart-
ure. In an earlier article (Busch 2012) I adopted a biographical approach to
empirically explore the linguistic repertoire and suggested drawing on a post-
structuralist approach which acknowledges the normative power of language
and particularly of categorizing discourses in constituting the speaking subject.
In this article I want to expand the concept of the linguistic repertoire in de-
veloping the notion of the lived experience of language, which foregrounds
the bodily and emotional dimension of intersubjective interaction.2
 B. BUSCH 3

PASSING FROM ONE SPACE TO ANOTHER

This article is based on the biographical approach within research on multilin-
gualism (Busch forthcoming_a), an approach that does not take individual é isso
languages or varieties as its starting point, but the experiencing subject with
his or her multilayered linguistic repertoire. The focus here is not on how
many and which languages speakers have available to them, or how ‘profi-
cient’ they are in their L1, L2, or Ln. The question is rather how linguistic
variation can serve to construct belonging or difference, and above all, how Empoderamento (ou não) dos falantes?
such constructions can be experienced by speakers as exclusions or inclusions
due to language.
Rather than speaking of multilingualism which somehow suggests the idea

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of a plurality of individual languages, I prefer in the context of the linguistic
repertoire to refer to Bakhtin’s (1981a) concept of heteroglossia. This concept
which, following Todorov (1984), encompasses the dimensions of multidis-
coursivity, linguistic diversity, and multivoicedness is inherent to any form
of living language and establishes a ‘dialog of languages’ (Bakhtin 1981a:
294), regardless of whether this dialog plays out within what is referred to
as one language, or between different languages that ‘have established contact
and mutual recognition with each other’ (Bakhtin 1981a: 295). To illustrate
the fact that nobody has one language only, Mikhail Bakhtin evokes an illit-
erate Russian peasant far from any urban center, whose linguistic environ-
ment is nonetheless characterized by diversity since it refers to different
worlds, each of which has its own socio-ideological constitution: the familiar
language of the village, the Old Church Slavonic of the Orthodox faith, the
‘paper’ language of bureaucracy, or the urban idiom of the worker returning to
the village to visit his relatives. Bakhtin writes, about this imaginary peasant:
Even such a man, however, deals not in fact with a single language,
but with languages—except the place occupied by each of these
languages is fixed and indisputable, the movement from one to
the other is predetermined and not a thought process; it is as if
these languages were in different chambers. They do not collide
with each other in his consciousness, there is no attempt to coord-
inate them, to look at one of these languages through the eye of
another language. (Bakhtin 1981a: 295)
The question I wish to investigate is what discomfort or confusion ensues if
one suddenly finds oneself not in a familiar chamber, but in an unknown space,
and becomes aware that one’s linguistic repertoire does not (completely) ‘fit’,
that one has to deal with a diversity of languages, and—again referring to
Bakhtin (1981a: 296)—‘that the ideological systems and approaches to the
world that were indissolubly connected with these languages contradicted
each other and in no way could live in peace and quiet with one another’.
Under the conditions of globalization, speakers participate in varying spaces
of communication which may be arranged sequentially, in parallel,
4 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE

juxtapositionally, or in overlapping form. At different periods in their lives, at

different moments of their day, or even simultaneously (with the help of
digital means of communication, for example), speakers participate in several
spaces that are socially and linguistically constituted in different ways. Each of
these spaces has its own language regime—its own set of rules, orders of dis-
course, and language ideologies—in which linguistic resources are assessed
differently. Space is understood here as socially constituted and constituting,
an approach that ultimately refers to Lefebvre (1991) who conceives space not
as something given but as constantly produced and reproduced in repeated
social (and linguistic) practices. Particularly interesting in the context of this
article is Lefebvre’s suggestion of a triadic approach in which space is analyzed
from the perspective of practices located in space, the perspective of discourses

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about space, and the perspective of subjective experience of space.
In order to examine in detail what happens when a speaker moves from a
known to an unknown space, I have deliberately chosen the example of an
experience shared by many speakers, namely changing from one school to
another one. What can be seen with this example which does not transgress
the borders of what is usually seen as one language can be extrapolated to any
other situation that involves the entering of an unfamiliar space, such as situ-
ations linked to mobility, migration, or displacement. The text referred to in
this article was written in the context of a university course by a student who
initially assumed that her linguistic biography was ‘boring’, because she had
grown up monolingual. I have selected a passage in which the student remem-
bers her childhood and the moment when she moved from the village school
to the secondary school in the regional capital. She writes about her first days
in the new school environment:
It was a very hierarchically structured class, most of the schoolgirls
came from the ‘upper classes’, and I felt very insecure and a little
deficient, comparing my rural vernacular with their ‘High German
from the regional capital’ [landeshauptstädtisches Hochdeutsch].
What the student describes in this short sequence is a remembered moment
of lived experience of language, a moment that she evaluates at the time when
she writes her language biography as significant because it represents in her
life trajectory an early moment of consciously feeling that she did not ‘belong’,
linguistically. Moments of lived experience of language inscribe themselves
into the linguistic memory, they become, as I will show in the following sec-
tions coming back to the student’s text, part of the linguistic repertoire, either
because they represent a special event with a strong emotional impact, as in
the case of the student, or because they occur repeatedly.3

CHANGING CONCEPTS OF THE LINGUISTIC REPERTOIRE

Generally speakers only realize that they have such a thing as a linguistic
repertoire when they are made aware that those around them perceive
 B. BUSCH 5

them as ‘speaking another language’—in our example, the schoolgirl with her
‘rural vernacular’ in the urban environment of the secondary school. In their
usual everyday life, the repertoire provides habitualized paradigms of language
use, which the speakers themselves scarcely notice.
Gumperz (1964) developed his concept of the linguistic repertoire on the
basis of his research in two medium-sized rural towns, one in India, the other
in Norway. The framework for Gumperz’s analysis is the speech community,
which he does not define in essentialist terms, but as a community constituted
through regular interaction over a long period of time. The linguistic reper-
toire, says Gumperz (1964: 138), ‘contains all the accepted ways of formulating
messages. It provides the weapons of everyday communication. Speakers
choose among this arsenal in accordance with the meanings they wish to

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convey’. The repertoire is understood as a whole, comprising those languages,
dialects, styles, registers, codes, and routines that characterize interaction in
everyday life. According to Gumperz, it is up to the individual speakers to
make decisions about the use of linguistic resources, but this freedom to USO?
choose is subject to both grammatical and social constraints. It is limited by
generally accepted conventions, which serve to classify types of expression as
informal, technical, literary, humorous, and so on. ‘The social etiquette of
language choice is learned along with grammatical rules and once internalized
it becomes a part of our linguistic equipment’ (ibid.). Gumperz’s concept moves
away from the assumption made in earlier sociolinguistic studies that particu-
lar ways of speaking indicate membership of particular regional or social
groups—just as the signifier indicates the signified. Although the linguistic
repertoire is internalized and is by no means random, it is understood as fun-
damentally open, as a means of positioning which speakers use in situated
interactions. And it is seen as forming a whole, across individual languages
or dialects, which speakers draw from as the situation demands.
These ideas explain why the concept of the repertoire is attracting renewed
interest in current sociolinguistics. This particularly applies to the analysis of
linguistic practices such as ‘language crossing’ (Rampton 1995) or ‘trans-
languaging’ (Blackledge and Creese 2010; Garcı́a and Li Wei 2014), in which
speakers make use of heteroglossic resources to construct meaning making.
Some authors suggest that Gumperz’s concept of the repertoire needs to be
updated in the light of processes of globalization, characterized by mobility,
migration, and transnational networks (Pennycook 2009; Blackledge and
Creese 2010; Garcı́a and Li Wei 2014). In his concept of the linguistic reper-
toire, developed in the 1960s, Gumperz assumed that the individual speakers
were part of relatively stable speech communities. Gumperz himself, forced to
emigrate from Germany to the USA in 1939, however, was no stranger to the
experience of linguistic displacement. His remark that ‘stylistic choice becomes
a problem when we are away from our accustomed social surroundings’
(Gumperz 1964: 138) can from our present point of view be read as a reference
to lived experience of language beyond the limits of a speech community.
6 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE

Gumperz’s conception of the linguistic repertoire is rooted in linguistic an-

thropology and interactional linguistics; it is based on the observation of lin-
guistic interaction. From the external perspective of the researcher, the
observable linguistic behavior is in the foreground; the focus is on rules and
conventions of communicative interaction, which are learnt, followed, and
occasionally subverted or broken. Gumperz’s tendency to locate the linguistic
repertoire in a linguistic community rather than in the speaking subject can
partly be explained by the fact that the subject, from an interactional point of
view, is not a stable category, but is constantly being reconstructed (and co-
constructed) in interaction with and in relation to others.
What is crucial in current elaborations of the concept of the linguistic rep-
ertoire is the move beyond the realm of speech community which is achieved

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either by taking a biographical perspective that ties the repertoire more to an
individual’s life trajectory or by taking a spatial perspective that focusses on
encounters in linguistically highly diverse settings. The orientation which links
the repertoire to an individual life trajectory is prominently represented by
Blommaert (2008) and by Blommaert and Backus (2013). In his earlier article,
Blommaert (2008) uses the example of a refugee from Rwanda to argue that
linguistic repertoires do not primarily give information about a person’s place
of birth, but about his or her journey through life. Nevertheless, in this concept
the notion of space also comes into play as repertoires do not tell us about a
supposedly stable geographical space (of origin), but about sociopolitical
changes and caesuras that reshape the space and impact on the repertoire:
‘The fact is, however, that someone’s linguistic repertoire reflects a life, and
not just birth, and it is a life that is lived in a real sociocultural, historical and
political space’ (Blommaert 2008: 17). Blommaert and Backus (2013: 2) ex-
plore the question of how linguistic resources are ‘functionally distributed in a
patchwork of resources and skills’ and how these competences enter into the
repertoire. They attribute a central role to processes of learning in formal lan-
guage learning situations as well as in informal encounters with language.
From a perspective of language learning and teaching, Rymes (2014) advocates
for a repertoire approach which moves beyond language and includes the
multimodal dimension of communication. She also locates the communicative
repertoire with individual speakers but emphasizes that they constantly need
to expand their repertoire in order to find a common ground of communica-
tion with the other. Pennycook and Otsuji (2014) take specific places in which
highly differing linguistic resources and everyday practices come together as
their point of departure to explore what they call ‘metrolingual multitasking’.
They develop the concept of ‘spatial repertoire’, which ‘links the repertoires
formed through individual life trajectories to the available linguistic resources
in particular places’ (Pennycook and Otsuji 2014: 166). In sum, the approaches
to the notion of repertoire which focus on individual biographies also take into
account the notion of space, and the approaches which focus on space also
acknowledge the importance of the biographical dimension of the repertoire.
What most of these conceptions have in common is that the repertoire is
 B. BUSCH 7

approached primarily from an interactional perspective, that is, by observing

speakers and analyzing their interaction.
In my conceptualization of the linguistic repertoire I take an approach, in
which I suggest complementing the third person perspective by a first person
perspective based on biographical narratives. I do not understand the speaker
as an (independently acting) individual but—in a poststructuralist move—as a TESEEEEEEEEE!!!!!
subject formed through and in language and discourse, and I understand the
repertoire not as something the individual possesses but as formed and de-
ployed in intersubjective processes located on the border between the self and
the other. This is precisely why I attach a crucial significance to the concept of
the lived experience of language. As I argued in an earlier paper (Busch 2012)
and as I will further develop below, language ideologies and discursive cat-

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egorizations—by others as well as self-categorizations—have a decisive impact
on linguistic repertoires. Eventually, Gumperz (2001: 37) himself drew atten-
tion to the fact that he had, in his earlier works, underestimated the role of
linguistic ideologies and their influence on internalized background know-
ledge and processes of linguistic interaction. In the following sections I wish
to argue that the observation-based interactional approach, for all its import-
ance, is not enough to capture the full complexity of the linguistic repertoire
people use to position themselves in relation to their social environment.
I argue that the concept of the repertoire can be expanded to include not
only the dimension of linguistic ideologies but also that of the lived experience
of language.

LINGUISTIC IDEOLOGIES OR METAPRAGMATIC DISCOURSES

Let us recall the description of the schoolgirl’s move from the country school to
the city secondary school. Due to the way she spoke, the writer tells us, her
fellow students from higher social strata, who dominated the class, identified
her as not belonging to their group, and relegated her to the category of the
‘others’, those with a rural language. She remembers that this made her feel ‘a
little deficient’. In retrospect, the writer perceives the class as ‘very hierarch-
ically structured’. The mechanism that the schoolgirls from the ‘upper classes’
evidently deployed to consolidate their position was a double one: on the one
hand they used metalinguistic discourses, denigrating the ‘rural’ or otherwise
‘inappropriate’ linguistic practices of their fellow schoolgirls, on the other hand
they performed linguistic distinction by speaking ‘High German from the re-
gional capital’.
Two things become clear from this example. First, the other girls’ identifi-
cation of the schoolgirl in terms of linguistic ideology means that she then
perceives herself as belonging to a particular category; this is what first
makes her ‘realize’ that she is ‘a girl from the country’. Differences in pronun-
ciation are used like a shibboleth4 as a criterion for inclusion or exclusion. And
secondly, the (negative) evaluation of her linguistic resources by others influ-
ences her own self-perception as a ‘deficient’ speaker.
8 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE

Pierre Bourdieu (1991) dealt with the way social distinction is learnt by
means of language in the course of socialization, inscribed in a person’s
body, and translated into a habitus. He shows how social and political power
relationships are produced and reproduced using linguistic distinction. The
crucial factor for the efficacy of such mechanisms is that they not only act
on individuals from the outside, but are incorporated. Thus people subordinate
themselves, voluntarily and almost without noticing, to ideas about what the
world is like and how categories of thought and feeling are formed, and come
to see these ideas as natural and self-evident. Theories of subjectivation, that is,
of becoming a subject, as developed among others by Louis Althusser, Michel
Foucault, and Judith Butler can help to understand how this voluntary sub-
ordination can come about. Althusser (1971)—using the famous metaphor of a

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policeman summoning somebody walking past—assigns the central role in the
constitution of the subject to acts of authoritative interpellation by and of
identification with hegemonic (state-)ideologies. To Foucault (1982) we owe
insights into how the power of categorization operates not only through inter-
dictions and restrictions but also by ‘technologies of the self’ that human
beings use to address and understand themselves, to effect operations ‘on
their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being’ (Foucault
1988: 17).
In her theoretical approach to subjectivation, Butler draws on Althusser and
Foucault and emphasizes the double character of discourse in constituting and
in subjugating the subject. Her work on gender, discrimination, power,
and performativity is based on the assumption that the concept of the subject
is ambiguous. The subject is regarded not primarily as an acting subject, but as
a subjugated one, whereby she understands subjectivation at the same time as
an enabling precondition for acting. Acting is preceded by subjugation (or
subjection) to the power of previously existing discourses, previously spoken
language. One could say that one becomes a subject by being repeatedly allo-
cated to already established identity categories. Every such recognition is at the
same time a misrecognition, because it reduces heterogeneous and ambiguous
elements to either-or categories. According to Butler, the constitution of the
subject by the discursive, performative power of language shapes thought,
speech, feelings, and even bodily being. Butler particularly emphasizes the
normative aspect of language, ascribing a performative power to this aspect.
Borrowing from Foucault, she argues that entry into the language system ex-
ercises a ‘productive’ censorship, which constitutes both the subject and the
legitimate boundaries of speech. She goes on to argue that this primary cen-
sorship, the entry of the subject into the normativity of language, is ‘reinvoked
in political life when the question of being able to speak is once again a con-
dition of the subject’s survival’ (Butler 1997: 135).
With regard to the linguistic repertoire, this process could be interpreted as
follows: The original constitution of the subject in language happens ‘un-
noticed’, as it were, as the child adopts the (grammatical and discursive)
rules of the language and embodies the ‘censorship’ imposed by these rules.
 B. BUSCH 9

This censorship is experienced as a crisis if the subject’s conditions of existence

are called into question, if there is reason to fear that one’s status as a subject
and one’s ability to speak will be denied. Butler discusses this with reference to
a regulation in the US army, according to which homosexuality was not for-
bidden, but admitting to homosexuality was. A situation may also be experi-
enced as a crisis when, for example, discourses (connected with different forms
of language and language use) telling us who we are and how we should speak
come into conflict with one another, and each of these ideologies demands
loyalty for itself. Those affected often describe this as a fear of betraying one
language in favor of the other (Busch and Busch 2013).
However problematic categorizations are, because they are always based on
exclusions and on a discursively constituted either-or, it is nevertheless im-

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possible to get by without categories. For example, if we receive a phone call
from an unknown person we involuntarily carry out a whole series of categor-
izations on the basis of language—gender, age, origin, education, social status,
and so on. This identification in situ also influences our own linguistic and
pragmatic choices, often without our noticing it. Metapragmatic stance
taking (Spitzmüller 2015) can be analyzed as a complex process by which
we align and position ourselves vis-à-vis others as well as with regard to lan-
guage ideological discourses. However, such categorizations are never inno-
cent. Linguistic ideologies are used to construct social, ethnic, national, and
other affiliations and exclusions. They have a major influence on whether we
feel that a language we speak brings respect, or whether we try to hide it from
others or even to get rid of it. Personal attitudes to language are largely deter-
mined by the value ascribed to a language or language variety in a particular
social space. In relation to linguistic repertoires, this means that the restrictive
or exclusionary power of linguistic categorizations is at its most noticeable
when language is not available as a matter of course, for example when
people are not acknowledged (or do not perceive themselves) as legitimate
speakers of a particular language or way of speaking. This may happen not
only when they enter a social space where the linguistic practices and rules are
unfamiliar to them—as in the case of the schoolgirl quoted above—but also
when spaces that were familiar to them are reconfigured, and, as a result,
change their linguistic regime within a short space of time. Such situations
can arise when state borders are redrawn or radical political changes occur,
bringing a reevaluation of linguistic ideologies. This happened, for example,
after the unification of East and West Germany, after the collapse of the former
Yugoslavia, and after the end of apartheid in South Africa. Thus in the region
covered by the former Yugoslavia, the collapse of the federation at the begin-
ning of the 1990s led not only to the emergence of new nation states, but also
to a reorientation in language policies, with a number of new national lan-
guages—Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin—being proclaimed in-
stead of the previously shared language, Serbo-Croatian. An effort has been
made to emphasize and consolidate differences between the newly proclaimed
languages, with the aid of new dictionaries and prescriptive discourses about
10 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE

correct language use. Such changes force speakers to reposition themselves in

relation to the new linguistic categorizations, even more so if they are required
to prove their loyalty by pledging allegiance to a ‘new mother tongue’ (Busch
2010).
Language ideologies or metapragmatic discourses about languages and lan-
guage use play a significant part in how others perceive us and how we per-
ceive ourselves as speakers. From a poststructuralist perspective, it is only
through discourses that ‘interpellate’ or ‘address’ us in the second person,
that tell us who we are and how we differ from other people, that we are
constituted as speaking subjects. Essential to the effectiveness of such mech-
anisms is that they do not only operate from the ‘outside’ and that they are not
primarily processed on the conscious level but are inscribed into the body,

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become part of one’s dispositions and communicative repertoire. Bourdieu
(1991) develops the notion of (bodily) hexis and (linguistic) habitus precisely
to underline the embodied character of social practices, but he remains rather
vague about the process of embodiment, which, according to him, operates
mainly through a system of rewordings and sanctions in the course of social-
ization; this is probably also why habitus, in his conceptualization, appears as a
relatively stable and static disposition.
In the following section I will argue that the linguistic repertoire develops
and changes throughout life in response to needs and challenges we are con-
fronted with and that emotionally lived experiences of singular or repeated
interactions with others—whether they are evaluated as positive or as nega-
tive—play a central role in the process of embodiment. In order to explore the
notion of lived experience I will suggest another shift of perspective: from
discourses that form the subject to the subject itself that is enabled, through
its very formation, to perceive, feel, experience, act, and interact, thus to pos-
ition itself vis-à-vis others and with regard to discourses. To accomplish this
change to a first-person perspective I will draw on a phenomenological ap-
proach—bearing in mind, however, that neither can the subject be conceived
as something ‘given’ nor can perceptions, feelings, experiences, actions, and
interactions be conceived as independent from the social-ideological world(s)
by which the subject is formed. It is this connection between the biographical
and the socio-ideological which is evoked by Gramsci (1971: 324) when he
writes: ‘The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what
one really is, and is ‘‘knowing thyself’’ as a product of the historical process to
date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an in-
ventory. The first thing to do is to make such an inventory.’

THE CONCEPT OF SPRACHERLEBEN—THE LIVED

EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE
Taking a subject perspective makes it easier to focus on the biographical di-
mension5 of the linguistic repertoire, that is, to reconstruct how from a
 B. BUSCH 11

speaker’s perspective the repertoire, starting in early childhood, develops and

changes throughout life. What interests us here is not so much the way lin-
guistic skills are acquired and accumulated along the time axis; instead we
wish to be able to trace how, by way of emotional and bodily experience,
dramatic or recurring situations of interaction with others become part of
the repertoire, in the form of explicit and implicit linguistic attitudes and
habitualized patterns of language practices. It is only when we do not
reduce language to its cognitive and instrumental dimension, but give due
weight to its essentially intersubjective, social nature and its bodily and emo-
tional dimension, that questions about personal attitudes toward language can
be adequately framed. For example, why, in certain situations in life, do people
give up a language that used to be familiar to them? Why are certain languages

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sought after, others rejected, and still others treated with indifference?
The concept of lived experience of language presented here is primarily
based on the phenomenology of perception, as developed in the 1940s by
the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, because it casts light on the
often-neglected bodily and emotional dimension of experience and speech.
Taking inspiration from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty (2009: 120) sees bodily
being as the basis for the subject. Our body, he says, is always with us. It
positions the subject in the world. Here Merleau-Ponty makes a terminological
distinction between the physical body [corps physique] as an object that is ob-
servable and measurable, and the living body [corps vivant] as the subject of
perception, feeling, experience, action, and interaction. He illustrates the am-
biguity of the body as simultaneously observing and observed, as affecting and
affected, with the example of the left subject hand that touches and feels the
right object hand.
Interestingly, we also find this ambiguity in the anecdote related by the
student (see above), who recounts her linguistic experience from childhood.
In her efforts to meet the expectations of the new school environment, she
tried hard to speak ‘High German’. ‘I still remember’, she writes, ‘how I more
or less listened to myself talking, from the outside, and felt like an actress, so
inauthentic did my speaking seem to me’. In this situation she experiences
herself—through the eyes or ears of the others—as an object, as someone
being observed. The consequence of her efforts at linguistic assimilation, moti-
vated by the hope that she will no longer be perceived as different by the
others, is that she now perceives herself as different, as a stranger.
The movement of the body is, according to Merleau-Ponty, the basis of the
faculty to relate to the world, to engage with it. The hand that reaches out to
grasp an object ‘knows’ what it is reaching for, and where that object is; there
is no need for the consciousness to construct a space–time diagram calculating
the points through which the hand will pass. A movement is learnt when the
body ‘gets it’, when it assimilates or incorporates it. According to Merleau-
Ponty, our ‘being-in-the-world’ [être-au-monde] does not begin with an ‘I
think’ [je pense], but with an ‘I can’ [je peux] (Merleau-Ponty 2009: 171).
12 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE

These thoughts are relevant for the understanding of the linguistic repertoire
because, according to Merleau-Ponty, language is also primarily a bodily phe-
nomenon (Merleau-Ponty 2009). Like gesture and emotion, language is first
and foremost about positioning oneself in relationship to the world, of project-
ing oneself toward the other—and only then is it also a cognitive act of rep-
resentation and symbolization. The bodily and gestural dimension of speech,
for which Merleau-Ponty (2009: 238) uses the term parole parlante [speaking
speech], precedes what he calls parole parlée [spoken speech], which he takes to
mean linguistic conventions and the sedimentation of spoken speech into a
language system.
The spoken word is a genuine gesture, and it contains its meaning
in the same way as the gesture contains its. This is what makes

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communication possible. In order that I may understand the
words of another person, it is clear that his vocabulary and syntax
must be ‘already known’ to me. But that does not mean that words
do their work by arousing in me ‘representations’ associated with
them, and which in aggregate eventually reproduce in me the ori-
ginal ‘representation’ of the speaker. What I communicate with
primarily is not ‘representations’ or thought, but a speaking subject,
with a certain style of being and with the ‘world’ at which he directs
his aim. (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 212)
Language, according to Merleau-Ponty, is anchored in the bodily and emo-
tional gesture, it is part of intersubjectivity, that is, of the projection from an ‘I’
to a ‘you’, and it therefore belongs to the realm Merleau-Ponty refers to as
‘intercorporeality’. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of spoken speech and intersub-
jectivity resonates to a certain extent with Bakhtin’s dialogic principle which
postulates that any utterance is responsive to earlier utterances and anticipates
utterances to come, that it is directed to a (physically present or imagined)
other and therefor bears traces of otherness:
[...] the unique speech experience of each individual is shaped and
developed in continuous and constant interaction with others’ in-
dividual utterances. The experience can be characterized to some
degree as the process of assimilation—more or less creative—of
others’ words (and not the words of a language). Our speech, that
is, all our utterances (including creative works), is filled with others’
words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of ‘our-own-
ness’, varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words
of others carry with them their own expression, their own evalu-
ative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate.
(Bakhtin 1986: 89)
The intersubjective or social nature of lived experience is also foregrounded
in Vygotsky’s (1994) notion of perezhivanie, of emotional experience, which he
sees as the prism through which environmental factors are refracted: t is the
emotional experience that determines what kind of influence a situation will
 B. BUSCH 13

have on a person. In a number of disciplines the rather neglected bodily and

emotional dimensions in the processes of experiencing, remembering, and
speaking are attracting growing attention, namely in neuroscience, psycholin-
guistics, and academic psychology and psychiatry (e.g. Damásio 1999;
Küchenhoff 2012; Lüdtke 2012). Fuchs (2011) draws explicitly on Merleau-
Ponty to develop a phenomenologically grounded concept of body memory.
He analyzes how, in body memory, situations and interactions experienced in
the past fuse together, and through repetition and superimposition, form a
structure, a style that sticks to the subject—usually without the subject’s
knowledge. According to Fuchs, body memory forms an ensemble of dispos-
itions and potentials for perceiving the world, for social action, communica-
tion, and desire. It functions as an intersubjective system, in which bodily

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patterns of interacting with others are established and constantly updated,
from childhood onward. If we conceive language as part of this body
memory, it becomes possible to understand repertoire in its biographical di-
mension, as a structure bearing the traces of past experience of situated inter-
actions, and of the everyday linguistic practices derived from this experience, a
structure that is constantly present in our current linguistic perceptions, inter-
pretations, and actions, and is simultaneously directed forward, anticipating
future situations and events we are preparing to face.
It is the emotionally charged experience of outstanding or repeated situ-
ations of interaction with others that keeps alive the process of inscribing
language experience into body memory, or more specifically into the linguistic
repertoire, whether a specific experience is charged with feelings of well-being
or of discomfort. Typically the latter are linked to situations that cause confu-
sion because the linguistic resources of the participants—their linguistic cap-
ital, as it were—are perceived as unequal. As numerous language biography
texts show (Busch and Busch 2008), this is especially likely to be the case
when self-perception and perception by others are not experienced as congruent,
when people experience inclusion or exclusion because of a language or a par-
ticular way of speaking, or when their own capacity of interacting by words is
associated with the experience of power or powerlessness. These three kinds of
experience of linguistic inequality, which could be referred to as key experi-
ences of multilingualism or of heteroglossia, can also be identified in the story
serving as our example, about the schoolgirl moving from country school to
city school when she talks about observing herself from the outside, feeling
excluded by her schoolmates, and perceiving herself as deficient.

INFRACTION OF LINGUISTIC OR PRAGMATIC

RULES—EXPERIENCING FEELINGS OF SHAME
In accounts of situations of the lived experience of language, a range of dif-
ferent feelings is mentioned including joy, pride, shame, anger, or fear. I will
now discuss the emotional dimension of the lived experience of language
14 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE

taking the example of feelings of shame, arising because one has used a
‘wrong’ word, a ‘wrong’ tone, or is speaking with a ‘wrong’, out-of-place
accent. This is often described as feeling as though everyone is looking at
you, or wishing the earth would swallow you up. It results in a kind of par-
alysis, an abrupt suspension of the capacity to act. The feeling of shame comes
suddenly and is experienced bodily in all its intensity. If one attempts to ana-
lyze the feeling of shame from a phenomenological perspective, following
Demmerling and Landweer (2007), the core element underlying the feeling
is the violation of a norm. We are ashamed about transgressing or disregarding
a norm, standard, or ideal; we feel shame before others, or, having assimilated
the norms, we feel shame before ourselves. The term ‘norm’ makes it clear that
the definition of things that cause shame is not universal, but is a product of

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history and society. The emergence of the feeling of shame is based on a
change of perspective: the person who, as a living body [corps vivant], is
involved in an action that initially causes him or her no concern suddenly
assumes an external view of himself/herself as an object body [corps physique],
and thus sees his or her action in another light, as the transgression of a norm.
As Sartre (2003) puts it, shame is in its first layer shame before somebody
and at the same time an act of acknowledging: I am ashamed of myself in
the way I appear to the other, and I acknowledge that I am as the other sees
me. In connection with language, this change in perspective may, for example,
be triggered by noticing signs of unease or irritation in the person one is
speaking to.
Situations of intense shame, Demmerling and Landweer argue (2007), affect
the self-image of the person who feels shame. Shame before oneself is the most
intense shame experienced, and is remembered for an especially long time,
because it relates to norms from which the person who has violated them
cannot distance himself or herself. An accumulation of situations of shame
can become concentrated into particular dispositions or attitudes, such as feel-
ings of inferiority or shyness. In terms of linguistic experience, this may mean
that people stop speaking a low-prestige minority language in public, that they
give it up completely, or that they avoid speaking in public at all, regardless of
language. Sudden transitions to other feelings may also occur, for example,
from shame to fear (e.g. of sanctions) or from shame to anger.
The approach used here to analyze shame could also be applied to any kind
of emotion associated with particular interactions. From a phenomenological
viewpoint, feelings can not only be expressed in the form of physical symp-
toms, but are to be understood as bodily gestures (toward the other). Hermann
Schmitz (1989, quoted in Demmerling and Landweer 2007: 22) distinguishes
here between feelings of constriction and dilation, in other words, between
gestures used to shut oneself off from the world, and those used to open one-
self up to it. Gestures of closing are often accompanied by a momentary hush,
or by a long-lasting retreat into silence, whereby the silence can change its
function over time: embarrassed or intimidated silence, silence as a place of
retreat, silence as a sign of defiance or a feeling of superiority. Julia Kristeva
 B. BUSCH 15

(1991) dedicated a separate, fascinating chapter of her book Strangers to

Ourselves to this multilayered ‘Silence of Polyglots’.
Such gestures of constriction or of shutting oneself off can stem from stress-
ful or traumatic experiences. In extreme cases of this kind, writes Merleau-
Ponty (2002: 190–1), ‘[...] the move towards the future, towards the living
present or towards the past, the power of learning, of maturing, of entering
into communication with others, have become, as it were, arrested in a bodily
symptom, existence is tied up and the body has become ‘‘the place where life
hides away’’’. The only way to untie the knot is to open up toward the world
again: ‘The memory or the voice is recovered when the body once more opens
itself to others or to the past, when it opens the way to coexistence and once
more (in the active sense) acquires significance beyond itself’(Merleau-Ponty

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2002: 191).
Researchers concerned with language teaching and learning are coming to
accept that learning languages is not a purely cognitive process, and that a
positive emotional experience of language, the chance to project oneself as a
speaker of the new language, is of vital importance for the appropriation of
a new language (Kramsch 2009). In the field of psychotherapy, the approach
discussed in this article was applied in a clinical study6 to explore how linguis-
tic resources can be activated in the process of coping with stressful or trau-
matic experiences. The study was interested in how the patients evaluate
different forms of language use that are part of their linguistic repertoire and
which ones they associate with positive or with negative feelings, and with
gestures of opening or of narrowing. The project aimed at identifying which
forms of language use can serve as potential resources with the aim of
strengthening resilience and which languages seem to be more appropriate
for certain phases of a therapy, in particular for talking about what was experi-
enced as extremely stressful or traumatic.
Even if lived experience of language throughout one’s life is engraved
in one’s linguistic body memory, the prelinguistic physical and emotional
interaction between the infant and its caregivers—conveyed by gestures,
facial expressions, sounds, or rhythms—seems particularly important.
Kristeva (2002: 101) has pointed to the importance of this prelinguistic inter-
action between mother and child, which constitutes a dimension of language
connected with the preconscious or unconscious, and with the bodily/affect-
ive. She refers to this dimension as semiotic, in contrast to the symbolic
function of language: It is characterized by sound and rhythm, by heteroge-
neousness to meaning and signification, by indeterminacy or ambiguity.
Kristeva identifies residual traces of the semiotic in the ‘psychotic discourse’,
when the subject is threatened by the collapse of the signifying function. She
also, however, sees them as present in what she calls poetic language: the
playful/imaginative undermining and disabling of the regulated and normative
aspects of language.
Such resources offer a great deal of potential, which can be reactivated in
situations of linguistic crisis (Busch and Busch 2013). Prelinguistic articulation
16 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE

is, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun (1994) puts it, the bearer of our
oldest, strongest feelings—of physical contacts, unarticulated sounds, words
that the child hears without understanding them, and which the adult sud-
denly rediscovers in a turn of phrase or a change in mood. Again from a
psychoanalytical perspective, Alfred Lorenzer (1981) makes a distinction be-
tween sensory/symbolic and linguistic/symbolic forms of interaction, compar-
able with Kristeva’s differentiation between semiotic and symbolic language.
He classifies the former (sensory/symbolic interaction) as part of the prelin-
guistic sensorimotor interaction between child and caregiver, which inscribes
itself into the body as a ‘memory trace’, in the form of a gesture, and which, by
repetition, forms a pre-reflexive structure that is the basis for the child’s ways
of acting and its passive expectations.

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So far it has mainly been psychoanalytical, or phenomenologically oriented,
philosophical approaches that have drawn attention to the exceptional import-
ance of the bodily and emotional dimension of language as a gesture oriented
toward the other. Linguists have yet to engage with this topic to a greater
extent.7

THE REPERTOIRE AS A CHRONOTOPICALLY LAYERED

STRUCTURE
In this article we have used the example of an autobiographical text—recalling
a schoolgirl’s move from an elementary school in the country to a secondary
school in the city—to consider the idea of the linguistic repertoire from three
different perspectives. The first, indebted to an anthropological or interactional
viewpoint, was concerned with how we interact linguistically and socially with
one another; the second, drawing on poststructuralism, looked at how we are
constituted as speaking subjects by historical/political discourses; the third,
inspired by phenomenology, investigated the bodily/emotional prerequisites
for speaking and experiencing language. What we have found is that the lin-
guistic repertoire interweaves social/interactive elements with historical/polit-
ical and personal/biographical ones. What Bakhtin (1981b) established with
the concept of the chronotope, the co-presence of different spaces and times in
speech, can be transferred to the linguistic repertoire: with every linguistic
interaction situated in the here and now, we not only position ourselves in
relation to what is immediately present, that is, the people we are interacting
with, and the context of the interaction. We also implicitly position ourselves
in relation to what is absent, operating or resonating in the background, and
therefore also intentionally or unintentionally present: relevant others, other
spaces and times from which we take our bearings. ‘Chronotopes’, writes
Bakhtin, ‘are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven
with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves
in ever more complex interrelationships’ (1981b: 252). In any case they en-
croach on the here and now.
 B. BUSCH 17

The multidimensionality of the linguistic repertoire explored here means a

move away from the idea that the repertoire is a set of competences, a kind of
toolbox, from which we select the ‘right’ language, the ‘right code’ for each
context or situation. The range of choices available to a speaking subject is not
limited only by grammatical rules and knowledge of social conventions.
Instead, particular languages or ways of speaking can have such strong emo-
tional or linguistic-ideological connotations that they are unavailable or only
partly available at particular moments. Our repertoire is not determined solely
by the linguistic resources we have, but sometimes by those we do not have;
these can become noticeable in a given situation as a gap, a threat or a desire.
The linguistic repertoire can be understood as a heteroglossic realm of con-
straints and potentialities: different forms of language use come to the fore,

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then return to the background, they observe each other, keep their distance
from each other, intervene or interweave into something new, but in one form
or another they are always there. Because language is, in Bakhtin’s term,
dialogic, because it lies on the border between oneself and the other
(Bakhtin 1981a: 293), the linguistic repertoire reflects the synchronic coexist-
ence of different social spaces in which we participate as speakers, and it points
diachronically to different levels of time. It not only points backward to the
past of the language biography, which has left behind its traces and scars, but
also forward, anticipating and projecting the future situations and events we
are preparing to face.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Tim McNamara and Ben Rampton for their feedback on earlier versions and their
thoughtful suggestions.
Conflict of interest statement. None declared.

NOTES
1 I use the German term Spracherleben to are discussed in Busch (2010) address-
point to the phenomenological founda- ing the desire to rediscover a denied
tion of the concept of Erlebnis or family language, in Busch (2012) in
Erleben (lived experience) as developed the context of a life lived in a contested
by Husserl (1982) in 1913. border space with its linguistic cleav-
2 The approach presented in this article ages, and in Busch (forthcoming_b)
was developed in a series of research focussing on the autobiographical text
projects around the topic of multilin- of a holocaust survivor.
gualism and school, or multilingualism 4 ‘Shibboleth’ is taken to mean a linguis-
and migration (www.heteroglossia.net), tic difference that does not indicate a
including the project ‘When Plurilingual conceptual difference, but is used to
Speakers Encounter Unilingual assign someone to a particular social
Environments’ (funded by WWTF). group or region. The term ‘shibboleth’,
3 Other examples of how moments of the Hebrew word for an ear of corn,
lived experience of language are related refers to the Old Testament book of
18 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE

Judges (12: 5–6), which tells how this 6 Transdisciplinary explorative pilot study
word was used as a password: whoever ‘Multilingualism and Resilience’ (2012–
pronounced it as ‘sibboleth’ was identi- 2014) conducted by Martin Aigner,
fied as a fugitive Ephraimite and was Brigitta Busch, and Luise Reddemann,
killed; only those who could pronounce funded by the University of Vienna.
the ‘sh’ were allowed to pass. 7 For studies on language and emotion cf.
5 For the methodological implications of a Pavlenko (2005), Schwarz-Friesel
phenomenologically based biographical (2007), Lüdtke (2012), Busch (2013)
approach see Busch (forthcoming_a). and Busch (forthcoming_b).

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20 LIVED EXPERIENCE OF LANGUAGE

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR
Brigitta Busch holds a Berta Karlik professorship in applied linguistics at the University of
Vienna. At present her main areas of research are the connections between migration,
linguistic diversity, vulnerability, and resilience as well as the development of biograph-
ical approaches in multilingualism research and of speaker centered approaches to lin-
guistic rights. Address for correspondence: Brigitta Busch, Institut für Sprachwissenschaft,
Universität Wien, Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Wien, Austria. < [email protected]>

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