Over time, the joint pursuit of an enterprise results in a shared repertoire of joint
resources for negotiating meaning (Wenger 1998:85). This includes linguistic
resources such as specialized terminology and linguistic routines, but also resources like pictures, regular meals, and gestures that have become part of the
community’s practice. In the New Zealand policy units, for example, we observed regular greeting rituals between members, understandings about how much
social talk was tolerable in varying contexts (Holmes 1998b), and preferred ways
of coming to decisions in meetings in different units. These linguistic manifestations of a shared repertoire provide an especially fruitful source of insights for
the sociolinguist and discourse analyst.