Multilingualism and Language Documentation

Pierpaolo Di Carlo

Jeff Good

The workshop has two main goals: (i) to introduce students to some of the challenges of documenting languages in settings characterized by high degrees of individual multilingualism and (ii) to lay out techniques for documenting multilingual practices within a community. Course topics will include: the interplay of community-level and individual-level multilingualism, sociolinguistic survey techniques for multilingual communities, metadata collection in multilingual environments, collection and annotation of multilingual data, and the role of ethnographic techniques in documenting multilingualism. Examples will be drawn primarily from Africa where multilingual societies have long been the norm, though students will be encouraged to bring in information on the multilingual settings where they work as well.

Methods for the documentation of multilingualism are at the cutting edge of current documentary practice, and this course should be of interest to students who aim to conduct documentation of specific languages spoken within multilingual communities, who have an interest in engaging in the documentation of multilingualism itself, or who are researching the sociolinguistics of communities where language choice plays a significant factor in encoding social differentiation.