Convivial linguistics: Initial thoughts on the documentation and description of language ecologies

In all fields of linguistics, awareness of multilingualism and heteroglossia as the unmarked conditions of linguistic life globally and through known history is growing. Yet, this multilingual turn faces considerable challenges, because the toolboxes of descriptive linguistics and language documentation were made for language-based studies. This is the case both figuratively, in terms of methods and epistemologies, and literally, in terms of available tools for linguistic analysis, which favour monolingual, monological and standardised language data rather than variable, multilingual speech in interaction. Ironically, multilingualism and usage-based language research therefore remain underresourced and underrepresented in the most language-rich regions of the world, and notably in Africa, where the dearth of basic descriptive works, sociolinguistic studies and available resources for multidisciplinary research teams compound the conceptual challenges.

At the same time, African linguistics is confronting its history as a colonial discipline and joins global initiatives to end data extractivism to the almost exclusive benefit of research(ers) in the Global North. A shift towards more collaborative and equitable research is hindered by structural inequalities enshrined in the institutions and societies hosting linguistic research, far beyond the control of individual linguists and research teams, and it is not my intention to trivialise these obstacles. Yet, as the Covid-19 pandemic is showing us, continued transcontinental collaboration at a time when fieldwork is largely impossible is both a current necessity and a catalyst for change towards a much deeper engagement with research participants and local researchers in the long term. Such collaboration needs to be based on relationships of trust and a much stronger involvement of research participants and researchers from the Global South in linguistic research, including in shaping its goals and research questions and applied outcomes.

The present crisis thus offers at the same time the opportunity to reconsider how we can achieve such more inclusive research paradigms. I welcome this talk as a chance to explore such agendas with fellow field researchers and Africanists, using the notion of conviviality as a central anchor. Taking part in and documenting social interaction while physically present or virtually connected with research participants and researchers in and from the field embeds conviviality into research practices. Deeper knowledge of interactional patterns of language use in turn empowers linguists to envisage more inclusive and communication-based support activities. Contrarily to voices that see language-based description and documentation or fieldwork in itself as epistemic violence and want to discard the very notion of language and of linguistic description as colonial, I believe such an endeavour compatible with the notion of language and of linguistic research. However, language can no longer be assumed to be a primordial entity, and language research needs to stake stock of its colonial history and assume a critical stance that is aware of its sociopolitical circumstances. I argue that linguists and research participants have much to gain from this endeavour: how speakers, observers, and analysts create language and other social categories discursively and metadiscursively and how this is related to colonial and postcolonial identity concept and how different perspectives result in different categorial options enables us to understand the relation between languages as reification and (trans)languaging as resource- and context-driven communicative practice. This dialectic is a necessary corner stone of convivial linguistics and language research as convivial practice that enables us to uncover the social forces shaping and changing its structure.