Pierpaolo Di Carlo

[IN PRESS]
The Kalasha-"the last Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush"-are mostly known through research focused on one of the three valleys where they are settled, i.e. Rumbur. Data collected in Birir, the southernmost and least known of the three valleys, is suggestive that what we refer to as "Kalasha culture" is in fact much less internally uniform than one might infer. One aspect where such differences emerge quite clearly concerns discourses and practices connecting patrilineages to local gods and ritual festivals. The texts illustrated in this article suggest that, in Birir, patterns of "ownership" of a deity or a festival constitute important yet thus far overlooked attributes of individual patrilineages. This observation finds some parallels in the pre-Islamic cultures of Nuristan and raises questions surrounding, for instance, the processes of creation of what are usually referred to as pre-Islamic pantheons across western Hindu-Kush and, relatedly, the extent to which the history of this area should be viewed first and foremost as the outcome of a multitude of micro-histories of lineages that are by and large selfsufficient, also in terms of cult.

Surveys can allow for the collection of non-speech data in a relatively short time and might benefit field linguists working in contexts of language contact. Existing survey models broadly share a basic structure embodying ways of understanding speakers and contexts of interaction that are ultimately derived from diglossia theory. By attempting a critical analysis of the ideological foundations of survey tools, this article provides the opportunity to recognize some key limitations that might affect the diagnostic potential of current survey models in specific contexts. A case in point is offered by Lower Fungom, in rural Cameroon, where forms of non-diglossic, small-scale multilingualism are practiced. Through the presentation of first-hand fieldwork experience and ethnographic data, it becomes apparent that a new model of surveying multilingual populations is needed in order to capture relevant information in such contexts. This article advances some proposals aiming to build such...

Special languages used for ritual and other purposes are known from a number of traditional African societies including Bafut, a chiefdom in the Cameroonian Grassfields. Previous analyses of this special Bafut code defined it "royal register" but the new analysis provided in this paper clarifies that it is best understood as a code meant to identify a speaker as a "real" member of the Bafut society. Based on a deeper understanding of the Bafut language ecology, this paper stresses that phenomena like that of the Bafut "royal register" share the same internal logic and stem from the same ideological matrix that gives rise to forms of traditional, egalitarian multilingualism in other parts of the Grassfields and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.

Use of multiple languages in everyday life is a real-world feature of most societies on Earth that poses a number of challenges to the linguistic cartographer. Recent work on lesser-studied communities practicing forms of multilingualism that are different from those on which current cartographic models have been developed raises new questions and, hence, new cartographic challenges. This chapter illustrates some proposals responding to these challenges and contextualizes them on the background of prior cartographic scholarship and of a reflexive account of the history of the interdisciplinary relationships between (socio)linguistics and geography on the theme of multilingualism.

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 carried out. The contribution is highly original, in particular, for its theoretical grounding of the proposed approach.

FULL-TEXT UPON REQUEST
Located at the northwestern edge of the Cameroonian Grassfields, Lower Fungom is a rural, linguistically highly diverse region (pop. ca. 12,000) where individual multilingualism in three local languages plus Cameroonian Pidgin English (henceforth CPE) is the norm, with a minority also speaking Cameroonian English. This article focuses on the different types of identity that can be projected via the use of English, CPE, and the local languages. Data come from language documentation projects and include self-reports, ethnographic observations, and analysis of language use. Such a diverse dataset allows us to uncover and discuss a number of aspects of the local language ideologies. Key here is the recognition that only exoglossic languages allow the representation of different identities qua membership in stereotypical categories-such as the case of English, which calls up stereotypes connected with authority and prestige-whereas the use of local languages is associated with village affiliation and, hence, relational rather than categorical identities. This ideological layer is not regimented by any form of prestige-or domain-based compartmentalization and, therefore, can hardly be captured by classical theories such as Fishman's (1967) extended diglossia theory, whose limits in doing research on African rural settings are highlighted. Also, inspired by Jenks and Lee (2016), this article suggests the existence of a heteroglossia of ideologies of personal identity (relational vs. categorical) most likely determined by the relatively recent entry of English in the local language ecology.

Questo studio ha due obiettivi principali. Il primo è quello di offrire spunti per restituire ai processi di formazione delle identità collettive nelle società “tradizionali” dell’Africa sub-sahariana la loro necessaria problematicità. Il secondo, di metodo, mira ad illustrare come si possano utilizzare dati sociolinguistici ed etnografici per ricostruire processi identitari collettivi di longue durée in contesti, comuni in Africa sub-sahariana, privi di fonti storiche scritte. Il per- corso inizia con una breve introduzione sui limiti dell’etnicità come strumento analitico nella comprensione dei meccanismi identitari in Africa sub-sahariana (sezione 1) e sul metodo d’indagine qui adottato (sezione 2). Viene quindi introdotta l’area di ricerca, il Lower Fungom, nei suoi caratteri generali (sezione 4) e in relazione ai fenomeni di multilinguismo locale (sezione 5). Le sezioni 6 e 7 costituiscono il fulcro dell’articolo in quanto in esse vengono presentati alcuni dati di uso linguistico e ne vengono proposte delle interpretazioni sociologiche che hanno delle conseguenze dirette sulla comprensione dei meccanismi identitari in questa regione del mondo. Lo studio si conclude (sezione 8) con una breve valutazione della possibile generalizzabilità delle interpretazioni proposte a contesti più ampi.

A GIS spatial perspective can provide important insights into many poorly understood sociolinguistic phenomena such as multilingualism in rural Africa. By relying on ethnographic and individual-based sociolinguistic information as well as on high spatial-temporal resolution data, our interdisciplinary team composed of linguists and geographers aims to (i) make original contributions to the cartographic representation of multilingualism and (ii) develop spatial-analytical models able to capture a complex array of linguistic, cultural, and spatial variables for a compact rural area of Cameroon.

Co-authored with Jeff Good, Ling Bian, Yujia Pan, and Penghang Liu (University at Buffalo, SUNY)

In a globalised sociolinguistics “[d]ifferent types of societies must give rise to different types of sociolinguistic study”, as Dick Smakman and Patrick Heinrich argue in the concluding remarks of their (Smakman, Dick. 2015. The westernising mechanisms in sociolinguistics. In Dick Smakman & Patrick Heinrich (eds.), Globalising sociolinguistics. Challenging and expanding theory, 16–35. London: Routledge) book Globalising sociolinguistics. Challenging and expanding theory. To this end, a basic condition must be met: both target languages and societies must be well known. This is not the case in much of Central and West Africa: with only few exceptions, here local languages and societies are generally under-researched and sociolinguistic studies have focused mainly on urban contexts, in most cases targeting the interaction between local and colonial languages. With regard to individual multilingual- ism, this urban-centered perspective risks to limit scholarly attention on pro- cesses that, while valid in cities, may not apply everywhere. For one thing, there might still be areas where one can find instances of endogenous multilingual- ism, where speakers’ language repertoires and ideologies are largely localised. The case in point is offered by the sociolinguistic situation found in Lower Fungom, a rural, marginal, and linguistically highly diverse area of North West Cameroon. The analyses proposed, stemming from a strongly ethnographic approach, lead to reconsider basic notions in mainstream sociolinguistics – such as that of the target of an index – crucially adding spiritual anxieties among the factors conditioning the development of individual multilingual repertoires in local languages.

Documentary linguists have been often urged to integrate language ideologies and other topics closer to ethnography than to linguistics in their research, but these recommendations have seldom coincided, in literature, with practical directions for their implementation. This paper aims to contribute filling this gap. After re-considering current documentary approaches, a case study from a documentation project in NW Cameroon is presented to show how an ethnographically-informed sociolinguistic survey on multilingualism can lead to progressively deeper insights into the local language ideology. The methodological implications that this research perspective brings to both documentary linguistics and language support and revitalization projects are discussed. A number of practical suggestions are finally proposed, illustrating the importance that language documentation projects are carried out by multidisciplinary teams.

Lower Fungom, in Northwest Cameroon, is one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the Cameroonian Grassfields. Seven languages or small language clusters are spoken in its thirteen villages and five of them are not obviously closely related to each other nor to any other language spoken outside of the region. This paper discusses the non-linguistic factors that may have resulted in this surprising linguistic scenario. The region’s overall ecology is examined and found unable to fully explain the situation. Ethnographic data, collected during recent field work in the area, are considered in the perspective of assessing the degree of correlation between linguistic boundaries and cultural boundaries. The emerging patterns are reviewed in light of oral histories, early colonial documents, and archaeological evidence. The detailed historical framework thus obtained indicates not only that the area has been characterized by a number of immigration events but also that in different periods these events have had different linguistic repercussions. The paper concludes by reconstructing several phases of the linguistic prehistory of Lower Fungom that seem, on the whole, to shed light on the processes that have led to its present linguistic diversity.

Abstract Unlike all the neighboring societies within the Hindu Kush region, the Kalasha still practice a pre-Islamic religion of Vedic origin. The process of culture maintenance finds in the ancestral language an irreplaceable symbolic resource for identity purposes. This, in ...

This paper elaborates on Blommaert’s (2007) re-appraisal of current Africa’s sociolinguistic reality—one in which ethnolinguistic units are recognized as fluid and language purism and denotational clarity as illusions. The case study is offered by the languages and societies of Lower Fungom, a small area located at the northern fringes of the Cameroonian Grassfields characterized by striking linguistic diversity and a language ideology which at the same time sees villages as embodying separate linguistic communities and fosters individual multilingualism. Thanks to data collected in the field in 2010 and 2012, it is shown that this apparently contradictory language ideology is crucial for individuals to represent affiliation in as many separate networks of solidarity as possible. It is also suggested that this social phenomenon is ultimately rooted in traditional beliefs in magic. The ethnographic data analyzed largely align with anthropological studies on African societies so as to allow generalization of some preliminary results and hypotheses at a supra-regional level.

In this paper the distribution of two structural features - pronominal suffixes in non-default possessive NPs and retroflex vowels - in the Indo-European languages spoken throughout the Hindu-Kush area is illustrated. Due to their peculiar cross-linguistic distributions, these features are potentially diagnostic for areal linguistic analysis. Despite the strict limitations imposed by the nature of the data at hand, the results seem to show a geographically well-defined area of diffusion embracing the Nuristani languages, Kalasha and a few other western Dardic languages. The questions whether these isoglosses could be better understood in a wider geographical context, or through the consideration of a former Burushaski substratum, are also outlined.

Riguardo alla questione della lingua nord-picena si è scritto molto e in direzioni diverse. Se allo stato dell'arte, sulla scorta degli illustri ma purtroppo vani tentativi proposti, mi pare ormai chiaro che il testo inciso sulla nota stele di Novilara (PID 343) sia intraducibile, ritengo che altri aspetti, seppur già toccati in studi passati, richiedano ulteriori approfondimenti. L'estensione del corpus epigrafico, la classificazione della lingua nord-picena e l'autenticità stessa della stele di Novilara sono, al pari della traduzione di PID 343, questioni irrisolte ma, a differenza dell'ultima, ancora aperte. Nelle poche pagine che seguono vorrei tentare di illustrare, nel modo più chiaro e conciso possibile, alcuni dati in parte nuovi e le prospettive che da questi mi sembrano emergere con maggiore chiarezza. Lo specialista noterà che, ad alcune nuove letture delle epigrafi, fanno seguito delle notazioni già proposte da altri. Lo stesso può dirsi dell'ipotesi che avanzo nelle conclusioni la quale, pur non inedita, pare essere stata da tempo abbandonata dagli studiosi. L'impianto generale delle mie ricerche rappresenta invece probabilmente l'unica vera novità nell'ambito degli studi sul nord-piceno. Esso infatti riflette la volontà di riconoscere e rispettare la condizione discreta delle diverse discipline chiamate in causa, senza per questo escludere la possibilità che i risultati a cui esse giungono autonomamente possano illuminarsi a vicenda.

This study deals with the problems connected to the identification of the so- called North-Picene language, i.e. the still unknown language in which the inscriptions of Novilara have been written presumably during the 7th-6th century B.C. Since only one of these has been found during the regular excavations of that proto-historic site (Brizio 1895: 175), the rest having emerged from the antique trade, the first aim is to establish which of the inscriptions traditionally ascribed to the “Northern East Italic” (Conway, Johnson & Whatmough 1933 = PID) is pertinent to the research (§ 1.0.). The re-analysis of the whole documentation available allows the exclusion of four of them, resulting in a corpus constituted by only two epigraphs: PID 343 and PID 344.
Following the most recent indications (Agostiniani 2003) for the epigraphic analysis of the longest and most significant inscription (PID 343), the study is directed towards an in-depth epigraphic and linguistic inquiry of the whole material (chapter 2, 3, 4). This analysis is compulsory not only for the central aim of the study, i.e. to identify the North-Picene Language, but also because an up-to-date epigraphic analysis allows some contemporary scholars to deny the authenticity of PID 343 (§ 1.2.1.), without which the North-Picene would simply vanish.
The epigraphic inquiry reveals that the presumed “inconsistencies” identified by recent researches (§ 1.2.3.) could be seen, on the contrary, as facts peculiar to a peripheral (and little known) tradition as is the one under analysis. Through numerous examples drawn from coeval material from Southern Italy (§ 2.2.), the reader is led to consider that other peripheral traditions similar to Novilara’s (such as the Messapic or some of the Greek writing traditions of Magna Graecia) show analogous features, “inexplicable” from the point of view of the Etruscan-Italic canon. The fact that, despite their “irregularities”, none can doubt the authenticity of these documents, will not solve our problem. On the other hand it can at least clarify that in the case of Novilara the purely epigraphic ground of argumentation cannot stand the claim that PID 343 is not authentic.
The presence of two (allo)graphs noting the sibilant in different phonic envi ronments (“asymmetric” sade before palatal vowels, “normal” sade in the rest of the environments, § 2.1.2.) seems moreover to suggest that in PID 343 we find traces of a palatalization process, which is far well diffused in natural languages. This fact also contrasts with the hypothesis of PID 343’s falsity: it is, at any rate, highly improbable that any 19th century forgery could have shown such refined linguistic knowledge.
Nonetheless the proposed linguistic analysis does not enable us either to translate the text nor to restore the historical dimension of the Novilara inscriptions: these remain deeply enigmatic, showing in many respects only chaotic references to ancient Greek as well as to Etruscan, Latin, Illyrian and some Italic dialects.
At this point the research needs to be addressed diversely in order to verify the historicity of these documents and thus their authenticity. Since the inscribed steles can be viewed and analysed as objects of material culture, the study tries to isolate a technological, decorative/figurative and dimensional repertoire common to the two steles (§ 5.1.), to be compared to other artefacts of the same typology, chronology and provenance (§ 5.2.). The result of this operation is the emergence of an extremely cohesive and distinctive group of decorated steles named the “Novilara group”. This becomes the corpus secundum of this study, i.e. the material defined on archaeological basis that keeps an explicit relation with the epigraphic (and linguistic) elements. In fact, we can safely assume that the corpus secundum is tightly linked to our corpus primum because the analytical repertoire fits perfectly to the “exclusive co-occurrence” rule:
1) all the features that define the “group” occur in overwhelming majority in each of the steles;
2) both the inscribed and non-epigraphic supports are decorated exclusively through the same models;
3) these models are strictly peculiar to Novilara and are absent in the rest of coeval Italic traditions (but present in Istria and Daunia, § 5.3., § 5.4., § 5.5.).
In other words we are allowed to ascribe both the figurative / technological repertoire of corpus secundum and the alphabetical / linguistic repertoire of corpus primum to one and the same cultural horizon, i.e. to the same ethnic group. Among the designs engraved on the constituents of the “Novilara group”, the boats, and especially the morphology of their stern and of the steering equipment, conflicts with the present knowledge concerning ancient Mediterranean naval technology (§ 5.5.1., § 5.5.1.1.). The only fitting comparisons come, once again, from peripheral traditions: Daunia, Istria, Illyria (§ 5.5.1.2.).
These are followed by a collection of short references to general characteristics of Novilara archaeological finds: the strong trans-Adriatic presences in the male burials (§ 6.1., § 6.1.1.), the isolation from the rest of Picenum proprie dictum (§ 6.1.2.) and the tight relation to the fortunes of pre-Greek Adriatic (§ 6.1.3.).
While a definitive solution seems distant, it is ultimately clear that both on linguistic (§ 3.3., § 4.41.) and archaeological ground (§ 6.2.) the references to the opposite shores of the Adriatic Sea are so numerous that they must be taken into account in order to solve the core problem of this research.
This would mean a new point of view on this marginal tradition for our Sciences of the Past.
Making a linguistic research on a corpus composed of only forty words requires some further clarification. It would have been at least desirable to have a larger corpus but this was simply not the case; on the other hand we must remind the reader that even in a brief, fragmentary text, one can encounter recursive phenomena, i.e. distinctive and functional elements: it is essentially a matter of good luck other than of scientific competence.
We believe that the case of Novilara was particularly lucky in this respect.

There are about 3,000 Kalashamon speakers in NW Pakistan who still practice a religion of likely pre-Vedic ascent. This study focuses on the least-known Kalasha community, that of the Birir Valley. Drawn from data collected during a 3-month fieldwork, this book contains both ethnographic and linguistic analyses based on 30+ hours of recordings, most of which were made in occasion of the Prun festival, peculiar to the Birir community. This is the first comprehensive study in which Kalashamon is viewed through the lens of a contrastive analysis between daily and poetic discourse.

In this paper, presented at the XLVI International Congress of the Societa' Italiana di Linguistica (Siena, 27-29 September 2012), I try to summarize my ongoing research on the endangered multilingualism practices in Lower Fungom, a linguistically highly diverse micro-area located at the northern edges of the Cameroonian Grassfields. Unlike most of the past and current research on Africa's "complicated" multilingualism, my focus is non-urban settings (only few scholars, among whom Bruce Connell and Friederike Luepke, are doing similar research). This orientation allows me to encounter traditional (i.e. most likely pre-colonial) sociocultural dynamics involving the development of multilingual competences. In particular, I stress that the apparent, yet so far neglected, connection existing between the individual's tendency towards maximization of the number of potential networks of solidarity (an ethnographic fact) and the use of language as the most powerful tool for symbolizing affiliation in one or the other network, could in fact be seen as being rooted in beliefs of magic. I also mention the possibility that data from Lower Fungom and similar contexts would stimulate re-consideration of the essentialist-indexical dichotomy in language ideology studies (though this part has not been developed in this talk).