SPEECH REPERTOIRES

In looking at examples of speakers' individual stylistic variability as we have done in Chapters 2 and 3 – speakers style-shifting across social situations or between recipients and recipient groups – we get a glimpse of the freedom that speakers enjoy in the domain that we are calling ‘style’. In Chapter 2 we saw that William Labov tended to play down this freedom at the level of the individual. He preferred to emphasise the general, normative, uni-directional shifts that sociolinguistic interviews can trigger towards a prestige spoken norm or away from use of a ‘stigmatised’ speech feature. In Chapter 3 we debated Allan Bell's claim – sometimes referred to as ‘Bell's principle’ – that speakers' stylistic latitude derives from and is contained by the social variation visible in the community. At the same time, Bell provided the idea of initiative style shift, recognising that speakers do also have creative agency. They can use style-shifts to ‘initiate’ new qualities or perceptions of a local situation. So in both cases we have the idea of constrained freedom. For both Labov and Bell, styling is the variation that speakers can perform within certain tolerances, dictated by the boundaries of their speech communities.

The conventional sociolinguistic concept here is speech repertoire. Ronald Wardhaugh (2002: 127) says we can talk of a speech repertoire when (and it is always the case) ‘an individual … controls a number of varieties of a language or of two or more varieties’.