Participatory approaches are widespread in the social sciences and they are also starting to take hold in the study of language in society. Participatory research is based on the involvement and engagement of as many stakeholders as possible and with a critical view to the quality or level of participation, including the participation of those who are usually called researchers (Bodó et al. 2022). Despite the rise of participatory approaches, there has been hardly any research on how, if at all, they can be linked to critical sociolinguistics. While critical sociolinguistics celebrates fluid language practices and develops concepts to describe them, such as languaging, heteroglossia, and superdiversity, stakeholders often stigmatize these practices as deficit and mixed (Spolsky 2021). We argue that a participatory approach in critical sociolinguistics is feasible, when heterogenity of all participants' linguistic ideologies become the focus of research, and participants seek to relate their own ideologies to each other through common acts of participatory practices. We illustrate this with two case studies from our own research project, which centered around understanding the contemporary language practices of potential stakeholders in a language revitalisation programme. We point out that the participants' (again, including researchers) common ideologising work (Gal & Irvine 2019) and situated knowledge (Haraway 1988) may lead to results which depend on the participants' own positionalities, be these practices of sociolinguistic belonging and nostalgia (Bucholtz 2003) or those of relational/functional multilingualism.
References
Bodó, Csanád; Barabás, Blanka; Fazakas, Noémi; Gáspár, Judit; Jani-Demetriou, Bernadett; Laihonen, Petteri; Lajos, Veronika and Szabó, Gergely 2022. Participation in sociolinguistic research. Language & Linguistics Compass 16(4): e12451. DOI: 10.1111/lnc3.12451
Bucholtz, Mary 2003. Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3): 398–416. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9481.00232
Gal, Susan and Irvine, Judith T. 2019. Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge University Press.
Haraway, Donna 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599. DOI: 10.2307/3178066
Spolsky, Bernard 2021. Rethinking language policy. Edinburgh University Press.
