Practicing Citizen Sociolinguistics

Heigl, Florian, Barbara Kieslinger, Katharina T. Paul, Julia Uhlik, Didone Frigerio & Daniel Dörler. 2020. Co-creating and implementing quality criteria for Citizen Science. Citizen Science: Theory and Practice 5(1). 1–11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/cstp.294
Robinson, Lucy Danielle, Jade Lauren Cawthray, Sarah Elizabeth West, Aletta Bonn & Janice Ansine. 2018. Ten principles of Citizen Science. In Aletta Bonn, Susanne Hecker, Muki Haklay, Anne Bowser, Zen Makuch & Johannes Vogel (eds.), Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy, 27–40. London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv550cf2.9
Rymes, Betsy & Andrea R. Leone. 2014. Citizen Sociolinguistics: A new media methodology for understanding language and social life. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 29(2). 25-43.
Svendsen, Bente Ailin. 2018. The dynamics of Citizen Sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 22(2). 137–160. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12276

This contribution functions as a stage-setting introduction to the panel ‘Practicing Citizen Sociolinguistics’. We position Citizen Sociolinguistics (CSlx) within the broader context of Citizen Science (CS), and as a methodological strand within sociolinguistics, discussing current conceptualizations, trends, and good practices on a general level, prior to the panel’s shift towards reports on current CSlx projects set in Austria, Finland, and Luxembourg.
In particular, we set up as a panel framework the quality criteria for CS projects developed for evaluating potential listings on the interdisciplinary CS platform ‘Österreich forscht’ (see Heigl et al. 2020). These were conceived as “minimum standards” and “assessable and explicit criteria” that operationalize core CS principles issued by the European Citizen Science Association (Heigl et al. 2020: 2, with reference to Robinson et al. 2018). As such, they lay out requirements regarding scientific practice, collaboration, communication, ethics, Open Science, and data management; and their basis are in fact ex negativo definitions of CS (‘What is not citizen science’).
This leads us into a discussion regarding the conceptualization of CSlx, as a sub-field of CS at large. We thus align our panel with what Svendsen (2018: 137) has explicated as “the engagement of nonprofessionals in doing sociolinguistic research”. This is in contrast to e.g. Rymes and Leone’s (2014: 25) notion of CSlx as “tracing the ways citizens (...) understand the world of language”, which, to us, seems closer to the concerns of folk linguistics and researcher-led investigations of language awareness.
We conclude with an overview of the panel’s key questions (How can CSlx be conceptualized? How and to what end does each project presented in the panel harness citizens’ involvement? What outcomes does CSlx facilitate in each case that other approaches cannot, and why? What are apparent concerns in terms of sociolinguistic theory, methodology, epistemology, and research ethics, and how can these be dealt with?), and of the panel’s structure, including a preview of the ensuing project reports, contextualized with the framework and definition of CS/CSlx we have provided.