Research Area
Communicative Repertoires in the Transforming Global South
It is through communication that transformation processes in the Global South reach broader awareness and come to notice. Individuals and social groups make use of communicative repertoires, including diverse forms of verbal and non-verbal communication together with communication instruments such as digital media. Communicative repertoires are construed as forms of social and symbolic capital and as such are an integral part of economic relationships and social networks. The research area investigates the transformation of communicative practices and the associated symbolic capital in order to shed light on changing power relations and how they are negotiated in everyday life.
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The ongoing transformations in the Global South involve not only a redirection of flows of migrants, labourers and citizens, money and debts, products and modes of social integration, but also the ways in which these flows are perceived and mediated through communication. The processes themselves are at least partly driven by expectations and apprehensions relating to new connections (and disconnections) which in turn rely on access to a variety of means of communication. Language - and more broadly the communicative skill of which it constitutes the centerpiece - is key for formulating such apprehensions or expectations and it is part of the action directed towards achieving what is anticipated and for avoiding what is feared. The distribution of communicative means and of what may be called symbolic capital is currently changing rapidly - with immediate and far-reaching consequences for individuals and groups and their position in the regional and global ecology of languages (Mufwene 1997, Dimmendaal 2008, Maffi and Woodley 2010, Lüpke and Storch 2013, Crevelt et al. (forthcoming)).
The adaptions of linguistic practices and the choices of communicative repertoires characterizing the newly emerging livelihoods and social worlds in the Global South have been variously investigated in comparative research under the labels of language endangerment (Hill 2002) and late impacts of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992). Within the GSSC an innovative approach to this domain of research will be developed, combining methods from media studies, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Core research methods include conversation and discourse analysis, participant observation, and behavioural experiments (inter alia, Scollon and Wong Scollon 2009).
The point of departure for our investigations will be a questioning of the conventional divide between urban and rural settings with regard to communicative practices. Inasmuch as increased mobility and, especially, the wide availability of mobile communication and digital media are key characteristics of current developments, it is likely that there are no longer any fundamental differences between "the city" and "the village". Instead, we hypothesize that we are dealing with a dynamic web of interlocking practices which allows for a very fast and comprehensive spread of new practices and styles across large areas, uniting inner cities with the most remote outposts of their hinterlands.
Our key concern is a detailed study of the communicative, and more generally symbolic, repertoires available to speakers in different settings in the Global South, in terms of the different codes being used, the different functions that they serve, and the different communicative situations in which they unfold. We aim to account as precisely as possible for the changing dynamics of codes, functions and contexts. To briefly illustrate but one aspect of these dynamics: a major role in these repertoires is typically played by (formerly) colonial and national languages, which often, though not necessarily, coincide. Here, we are currently observing a continuously accelerating process of what could be variously called indigenization or regionalization (as seen in the rise of the New Englishes, new regional variants of Indonesian centering around provincial centres, etc.). At the same time, “strong” languages in a given area are expanding their domains (e.g. Yoruba in Nigeria, Tagalog in the Philippines) and interact with these linguistic “superpowers”. In digital media and mobile communication a third layer of linguistic codes is being used, defining different types of (often) smaller networks.
The approach to be developed here is comparative along two axes: it compares developments across different regions of the Global South with the goal of identifying common tendencies and more locally confined features. But it also contrasts developments in the Global South with what has happened (and continues to happen) in “the North”, which still defines the sociolinguistic mainstream. Put differently, research in this field will also make major contributions to a considerably revised and extended theory of language and society which takes into account characteristic developments occurring outside the extensively investigated Western industrialized countries. Here, our approach also aims directly at one of the central debates on the Gobal South: megacities such as Lagos, Jakarta, and so on, which are increasingly seen as “laboratories of the future” insofar as they not only symbolize the homes of almost half the people living in the countries of Global South, but are also spaces where the state and its infrastructure lose control and are substituted by vigilantes, occult networks, and violent competition – a situation that is considered an emerging possible future scenario in Western countries as well. Communicative practices as a form of social and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1983, Hanks 1996) will be investigated as an integral part of the economic relationships and social networks in which individuals and groups are positioned and which they in turn shape through the use of language repertoires.
By investigating transformations in linguistic practices and the symbolic capital attributed to them, we will shed light on how power relations change and on how this is negotiated on a daily basis (Hill 2001, Lacoste et al. 2013). Finally, we shall also include, reflectively, the way in which the discourse about the Global South itself relies on certain forms of language use and the way in which it enters local, regional and trans-regional language repertoires. In this context we shall also ask whether ideas about the Global South as a negative counter-image of the Global West are reproducing existing inequalities, inversions and oppositions.
Projects
Multi-lingual communication and social diversification: Urbanization and Language Change in Gulu, Northern Uganda
Region: Africa, Uganda
Department: Institute for African Studies and Egyptology
Research Area: Communicative Repertoires in the Transforming Global South
Period: 2014-01 to 2016-12
Person(s): Gerrit J. Dimmendaal
Fading Delimitations: Language, Culture and Ethno-Linguistics of the Maha in Northeast Nigeria
By looking at the Maha in their relation to the Hausa, Kanuri, Fulani and other dominant ethnic groups surrounding them, we analyze how their location close to the borders of rival empires has influenced their language. In particular, we identify factors which since colonial times have led to a gradual language shift and ethnic conversion.
Region: Africa
Department: Institute for African Studies and Egyptology
Research Area: Communicative Repertoires in the Transforming Global South
Period: 2010-01 to 2015-12
PAGE: Prosodic and gestural entrainment in conversational interaction across diverse languages
The aim of the project is to establish re-usable infrastructure at laboratories in Europe and in the field for investigating the extent to which participants in a dialogue entrain to (imitate) each other in dialogues.
Region: Europe
Department: Department of Linguistics
Link: page.home.amu.edu.pl
Research Area: Communicative Repertoires in the Transforming Global South
Period: 2013-01 to 2015-12
Person(s): Nikolaus P. Himmelmann
CLARIN-D – Linguistic Fieldwork, Anthropology, Language Typology
CLARIN-D unterstützt die linguistische Feldforschung, Ethnologie und Sprachtypologie durch die Bereitstellung von Services zum Auffinden von Sprachdaten, zur Analyse von geschriebenem und gesprochenem Text und zur langfristigen Verfügbarmachung und Bereitstellung von Korpora und Forschungsergebnissen. Zur Unterstützung der Feldforschung durch die digitale Forschungsinfrastruktur vernetzen sich Forschende in der Fach-AG 3 »Linguistische Feldforschung, Ethnologie, Sprachtypologie« des CLARIN-D Projekts.
Department(s): Department of Linguistics, Institute for African Studies and Egyptology, Competence Area IV
Link: www.clarin-d.de
Research Area: Communicative Repertoires in the Transforming Global South
Period: 2014-01 to 2016-12
Person(s): Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Thomas Widlok
Anthropological Models: A Reconstruction of the First African Frontier
This project explores anthropological models of hunter-gatherer social dynamics and seeks to relate these models to the theoretical idea of a frontier, which means explaining forms of social organisation as the outcome of a condition of gradual expansion, and conversely this expansion as the result of specific social dynamics.
Region: Africa
Department(s): Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Institute for African Studies and Egyptology, Competence Area IV
Link: www.sfb806.uni-koeln.de
Research Area: Natural Commodities and Changing Markets in the Global South, Communicative Repertoires in the Transforming Global South
Period: 2013-01 to 2018-12
Person(s): Michael Bollig, Thomas Widlok
