‘Is English also the place where I belong?’: linguistic biographies and expanding communicative repertoires in Central Java

This article employs the term ‘communicative repertoire’ in order to highlight that when one learns any new ‘language’, one introduces new communicative resources into a unified communicative repertoire. As repertoires represent such singular ‘grammars’ in individuals’ minds, learned communicative resources can be deployed across all of the speaker's ‘languages’. In the single case study presented in this article, one individual from a medium-sized town in Central Java does not just learn ‘English’; he learns, along with this new language, new ways of thinking not encountered in his upbringing. He learns about the locally situated social and political nature of multiple registers of English, Indonesian and Javanese, and he explores how and when to deploy a complex and growing set of communicative resources in measure to achieve communicative ends and a comfortable self-image. As individuals’ personal communicative repertoires – and thus their experiences with people, information and ways of thinking and being in the world – shift and change, expand and contract, their strategies for communicating do as well, and they learn to orient themselves differently within their multiple daily communities; in short, to manoeuvre through the world with a nuanced and complex communicative repertoire.