Di Carlo, Pierpaolo2016-08-182016-08-182016Pierpaolo Di Carlo. 2016. 'Multilingualism, affiliation and spiritual insecurity. From phenomena to processes in language documentation.' In African language documentation: new data, methods and approaches, Special Publication No.10 of Language Documentation & Conservation, edited by Mandana Seyfeddinipur, pp. 71–104. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24649978-0-9856211-6-2http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24649Documentary linguists have often been urged to integrate language ideologies and other topics more closely 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 to 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 of language documentation projects being carried out by multidisciplinary teams.Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike LicenseText