3: What does participatory research contribute to linguistics? A view from Africa Russell Norton Abstract: This article identifies methodological contributions that participatory research makes to linguistics. Participatory linguistic research emerged in Africa from Kutsch Lojenga (1996). Roles in participatory research are termed here “formal researcher” and “community participant” which describe their invariant attributes. The formal researcher is an organiser and a facilitator, representing an evolution from a traditional linguistic fieldwork role. The community participants are ideally literate decision-makers, producing a telescoping effect on applications of the research. Participatory linguistic research produces accurate data, by avoiding outsiders’ transcription errors and through priming effects on phonemic analysis and collection of lexemes. It produces natural data, through goal-sharing and triangulation among the research participants, filtering against artificial and idiosyncratic language forms or judgments. Triangulation among the research participants may also mitigate against groupthink and entrenched confirmation bias. Participatory linguistic research has innovated the use of group consensus acceptability judgments, and calls for renewed attention to the etic/emic distinction. Keywords: participatory linguistic research, research roles, group research, discovery, telescoping effect, priming effect, triangulation, acceptability judgments, etic, emic 1 Introduction: The emergence of participatory linguistic research 1 Participatory research has emerged in linguistics in the context of pioneer studies of underdescribed and underdeveloped languages, beginning with Kutsch Lojenga (1996) on the Ngiti [niy] 2 language of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Members of a language community can participate in research on their language by contributing from their emic 3 standpoint on the language, and by contributing immediate decisions about how to represent and document the findings. This is impacting linguistics both in its methods and in its results. Participatory research has arisen before in other community-oriented fields, such as social justice (Burns et al 2021), education (Freire 1970/2000), public health (Macaulay 2017), international development (Chambers 1994), natural resource management (Barreteau et al 2014), and sociolinguistics (Truong & Garcez 2012). The expression “participatory research” has emerged as an umbrella term for research in which research professionals include community stakeholders as co-researchers. Participatory approaches from other fields are 1 My thanks go to the many people I have learned from in the course of becoming a participatory linguist: my colleagues in SIL International, Connie Kutsch Lojenga, Tim Stirtz, and Oliver Kröger as pioneers in participatory linguistic research; community participants I have worked with for various languages in Nigeria and Sudan; my MA students who have learned to do participatory linguistic research with me; audiences at my presentations at the Jos Linguistics Circle; and the editors and anonymous reviewers of this article. 2 All language names are followed by their three-letter ISO 639-3 identifier code given in square brackets, as used in the Ethnologue (Eberhard et al. 2023). 3 The emic standpoint is the standpoint of someone inside the community, as opposed to the etic standpoint of someone from outside the community. A generalisation of the phonetic/phonemic distinction, the etic/emic distinction has spread widely in anthropology and the social sciences (Mostowlansky & Rota 2020, Headland 1990/2018). See also §§3.1, 4 below. LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION AND CONSERVATION SPECIAL PUBLICATION NO. 29 Participatory linguistics: Methods and case studies from around the world https://hdl.handle.net/10125/74744 28