We introduce a weak notion of 2 × 2-minors of gradients of a suitable subclass of BV functions. In the case of maps in BV (R 2 ; R 2 ) such a notion extends the standard definition of Jacobian determinant to non-Sobolev maps.We use this distributional Jacobian to prove a compactness and Γ-convergence result for a new model describing the emergence of topological singularities in two dimensions, in the spirit of Ginzburg-Landau and core-radius approaches. Within our framework, the order parameter is an SBV map u taking values in S 1 and the energy is made by the sum of the squared L 2 norm of ∇u and of the length of (the closure of) the jump set of u multiplied by 1 ε . Here, ε is a length-scale parameter. We show that, in the | log ε| regime, the Jacobian distributions converge, as ε → 0 + , to a finite sum µ of Dirac deltas with weights multiple of π, and that the corresponding effective energy is given by the total variation of µ .