Diffuse language systems in contact: A comparative study of multilingual ecologies in West Africa

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Klaus Beyer
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 560468727

The proposed project intends to analyze and describe comprehensive sets of already existing sociolinguistic data from two different multilingual ecologies in West Africa. Some general questions and challenges it strives to respond to are the following: • What are the main social and linguistic factors that contribute to mutual understanding of speaker groups and the development of – even temporary – speech norms in such multilingual contexts? • Is an actual speaker’s multilingual repertoire really just an addition of two or more defined language systems or is there a more adequate way to describe and analyze speakers’ multilingual realities? • Take up the challenge to produce reusable sets of sociolinguistic speaker data combined with annotated multilingual discourse data from multilingual ecologies in diffuse contexts. The first set of data stem from a rural contact zone of multiple ethnolinguistic groups in the border land of Mali and Burkina Faso while the second set covers a multilingual urban ecology in Cameroon, namely the capital of the Adamawa province in northern Cameroon. These data will be uploaded to an accessible data repository following a sophisticated RDM (research data management) plan guided by the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. It proposes a three-dimensional approach corresponding to the bullet points above: Firstly, it will analyze multilingual speech events among groups of speakers from the two contexts comparatively in order to generate hypotheses about the instantiation and stabilization of such repertoires. It will concentrate on norm building processes on the level of actual speaker interaction looking at only two linguistic variables, namely noun class morphology and discourse markers. Secondly, the project addresses the ever-growing urgency of developing a new epistemology to study and capture the phenomenon of multilingual speech while putting aside untenable reifications of named languages and codes that are at best imaginary constructs of linguists and speakers likewise. A more adequate and realistic description of the data will be proposed. The third objective of the project relates to the documentation part. The PI has complete sets of language and speaker data at his disposal. He intends to upload interlinearized and annotated multilingual discourse data tied to concomitant sets of social meta data of the involved speakers. Such comprehensive data sets will allow other researchers to test own hypothesis on correlations between social factors and multilingual speech outcomes on a meso-level of language-contact theory.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants