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With more than seventy named languages, and many more locally distinctive varieties, the Cameroonian Grassfields are known for their impressive linguistic diversity. At the same time, the languages of the Grassfields also show a considerable degree of structural homogeneity and lexical similarity which is suggestive of both genealogical relatedness and prolonged processes of contact-induced convergence. However, fine-grained comparative analyses reveal puzzling situations of similarities and differences among neighboring languages and varieties. Often left unaddressed or viewed as “irregularities”, these cases might in fact provide insights into low-level language dynamics that have contributed significantly to the development of the regional linguistic configuration. In this paper, we focus on two such cases involving noun classes and tense-aspect marking and propose a model of language change based on a notion that we term the social semiosis layer, which is viewed as a specific part of a linguistic feature pool. When paired with the existing notion of neighbor opposition, it can account for situations where there is evidence that specific forms have been deliberately manipulated to create salient distinctions among varieties in a given local sociolinguistic context. 

Abstract Linguists are seldom, if ever, engaged in work aimed at communicating risk to the general public. The COVID-19 global pandemic and its associated infodemic may change this state of affairs, at least for documentary linguists. Documenting languages may bring researchers in direct contact with communities speaking minority or marginalized languages and gain key insights into their communicative ecologies. By being both immersed in local networks and more or less knowledgeable about the community’s communicative habits, documentary linguists appear to be placed in a unique position to contribute to communicating risk in ways that are better tailored to the community and, therefore, potentially quite effective locally. Furthermore, adding work in risk communication to their agenda may also stimulate documentary linguists to find new models for “giving back” to the communities they work with. In order to provide a concrete example of how all this may play out in concrete terms, we illustrate the virALLanguages project. 

Purpose: To contribute to the establishment of a novel approach to language documentation that includes bilingual and multilingual speech data. This approach would open this domain of study to work by specialists of bilingualism and multilingualism. Approach: Within language documentation, the approach adopted in this paper exemplifies the “contemporary communicative ecology” mode of documentation. This radically differs from the “ancestral-code” mode of documentation that characterizes most language documentation corpora. Within the context of multilingualism studies, this paper advocates for the inclusion of a strong ethnographic component to research on multilingualism. Data and Analysis: The data presented comes from a context characterized by small-scale multilingualism, and the analyses provided are by and large focused on uncovering aspects of local metapragmatics. Conclusions: Conducting language documentation in contexts of small-scale multilingualism requires that the adequacy of a corpus is assessed with regard to sociolinguistic, rather than only structural linguistic, requirements. The notion of sociolinguistic adequacy is discussed in detail in analytical terms and illustrated through an example taken from ongoing research led by the authors. Originality: To date, there are no existing publications reviewing in the detail provided here how the documentation of multilingual speech in contexts of small-scale multilingualism should be structured. The contribution is highly original, in particular, for its theoretical grounding of the proposed approach. Significance/Implications: This article can serve as a reference for those interested in methodological and theoretical concerns relating to the practice of language documentation in contexts of small-scale multilingualism across the world. It may also help clarify ways for sociolinguists to engage more closely with work on language documentation, a domain that has thus far remained primarily informed by structural linguistic approaches. 

https://www.languageonthemove.com/message-vs-community-centered-models-in-risk-communication/