After having spent three years of research on the small-scale multilingual setting in the Crossroads research area in Southern Senegal, we have started expanding our horizon last year, first through a joint workshop with our sister project KPAAM-CAM, which is located in Northwestern Cameroon, followed by a workshop at LDLT also involving researchers from Brazil and Australia. The LDLT workshop marked the beginning of a British Academy International Partnership and Mobility Grant awarded to Kristine Stenzel (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and myself, which has as its topic the development of a typology of small-scale multilingual settings.

The time is approaching fast for the second workshop funded by this partnership: a workshop bringing two Crossroads researchers together with eleven researchers based in Brazil. Over five days we will exchange findings, approaches and methodologies and show each other documentaries stemming from our research in order to deepen our understanding of the particularities and commonalities of the precolonial multilingual settings in both areas and of how they have been and are being transformed by globalisation. The first three days of the workshop( August 21 to August 23), organised by Kris Stenzel and Bruna Franchetto at the Museo do Índio in Rio will be public; two final days will be used by the participants to develop plans for joint publications and ideas for future collaboration. The full workshop programme can be found here.

This partnership is not explicitly dedicated to looking at transformations of multilingualism in the Atlantic space, which brought slaves from often multilingual societies a the Upper Guinea Cost of West Africa to the Americas and the Carribean, also areas with precolonial multilingual settings – such a perspective would require a much bigger initiative. Yet, even when comparing settings in their respective areas and in their own right, it is striking that they have been affected for the past five hundred years by colonisation and globalisation in very much the same way, and partly by the same colonial powers, and that they exist in postcolonial nation states with similar policies of continuation of colonial language policies and exclusion. It’s high time then that we start talking to each other!