Languages in Interaction: Global Perspectives

This course uses linguistic diversity as a prism through which students discover the multifaceted nature of language, from its interactional foundations to its cultural embedding. Inverting usual perspectives, the course centers scholarship from around the world instead of well-trodden topics from the Anglosphere. After all, the Global South —including Africa, Asia, Oceania and Latin America— hosts most of humanity and therefore also most of the world's linguistic and sociocultural diversity. The Research MA level content of this course content fosters clear and critical thinking and includes modes of assessment geared towards research skills. The foundation of the course is the use of language in social interaction. This empirical focus allows us to systematically address major topics of research in sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics and the ethnography of communication. Lectures are structured around concrete linguistic phenomena: interactional routines like greetings or triadic communication; special registers like youth languages and avoidance vocabularies; and linguistic resources like interjections, ideophones, and personal names. The lectures show how such phenomena are grounded in interactive language use and how they can be understood in the light of theories about language, culture and communication. This course was developed by Mark Dingemanse, Sandy Barasa, and Saskia van Putten. It has been taught in various guises since the academic year 2022-2023.