ABSTRACT
Linguistic diversity has become a central feature in daily lives. It has also become a central feature of societies whose self-understandings were or still are deeply rooted in a monolingual paradigm. In sociolinguistics, traditional approaches which assumed a stable link between language and national, ethnic or social belonging and were based on the idea of languages conceived as pre-established, clear-cut, bounded entities are increasingly being abandoned in favour of approaches that foreground speakers’ heteroglossic language practices and repertoires. Whereas Gumperz’ (1964) original notion of linguistic repertoire takes the outside perspective of the observer, biographical approaches emphasise the perspective of the experiencing and speaking subject. They contribute to an understanding of the linguistic repertoire as reflecting individual life trajectories, heterogeneous life worlds and discourses about language and linguistic practices referring to specific time-spaces (Blommaert, 2009; Busch, 2012). Biographical research has proven to be particularly productive in addressing topics such as subject positions or identity constructions, language and emotion, fears and desires associated with ways of speaking or language attitudes linked to language ideologies or discourses on language (Kramsch, 2009; Busch, 2015a).
