Programm 78. Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft

In this talk I will discuss possible challenges and cultural barriers that can come up during collaboration with researchers from non-WEIRD countries. I will be drawing from my own experience working with linguists and medical researchers during my recent field trip to Bolivia, South America. I will also make a case for why linguists should always try to approach and work with local researchers when conducting studies in non-WEIRD countries. Something that may seem self-explanatory but is indeed still a large issue, as I will illustrate in the case of highland Bolivia

Thanks to the rise of globalization, cross-cultural scientific collaboration has never been easier and therefore more common (Mannan and Maruf 2025). As linguists, this allows us to collect larger and more diverse language samples (Blasi et al. 2022; Henrich et al. 2010), increase the reliability of our data by having it verified by local experts (Bowern 2015; Czaykowska-Higgins 2009), benefit from bringing together different specializations which may be unique to each working culture (Czaykowska-Higgins 2009; Dusdal and Powell 2021), and share our research with larger international audiences.
However, while collaborations within WEIRD countries may seem relatively straightforward, collaboration between non-WEIRD and WEIRD countries can lead to a number of (unexpected) issues, such as communication issues between researchers due to linguistic differences (Bagshaw et al. 2007) and differences in working cultures (Ndzenyuiy and Keller 2025), health issues due to environmental factors, such as food, differences in work-life balance, and/or culture shock (Bowern 2015), scepticism within non-Western countries due to colonial history and prior unethical behaviour among Western researchers (Irvine 2008; Leonard 2018), and incompatibility of research frameworks designed with WEIRD populations in mind (Abbi 2001; Speed et al. 2018).
However, it would be unwise to make more concrete generalized claims about collaboration between just any WEIRD and non-WEIRD country, as the specifics vary greatly from culture to culture. In this talk, I will therefore provide some examples for the challenges of cross-cultural collaboration drawn from my own recent fieldwork experience in Bolivia, South America, where I collaborated with Bolivian researchers who were raised in indigenous communities and where we collected data with indigenous Quechua-speaking participants. This examples include a higher focus on qualitative rather than quantitative approaches, a less strict divide between work and leisure, conflicts milder local data protection laws and the GDPR, as well as suspicion towards white researchers due to a history of Spanish colonialism and multiple accounts of political interference from the United States.

References:
Abbi, A. 2001. A Manual of Linguistic Field Work and Structures of Indian Languages. Lincom GmbH, München.
Bagshaw, Dale, Margret Lepp & CeCelia R. Zorn. 2007. International research collaboration: Building teams and managing conflicts. Conflict Resolution Quarterly 24(4). 433-446.
Blasi, Damián E., Joseph Henrich, Evangelia Adamou, David Kemmerer & Asifa Majid. 2022. Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 26(12). 1153-1170.
Bowern, Claire. 2015. Linguistic Fieldwork.
Czaykowska-Higgins, Ewa. 2009. Research Models, Community Engagement, and Linguistic Fieldwork: Reflections on Working within Canadian Indigenous Communities. Language Documentation & Conservation 3. 182-215.
Dusdal, J. & J. J. W. Powell. 2021. Benefits, Motivations, and Challenges of International Collaborative Research: A Sociology of Science Case Study. Science and Public Policy 48(2). 235-245.
Henrich, J., S. J. Heine & A. Norenzayan. 2010. The weirdest people in the world? Behav Brain Sci 33(2-3). 61-83; discussion 83-135.
Irvine, Judith T. 2008. Subjected words: African linguistics and the colonial encounter. Language & Communication 28(4). 323-343.
Leonard, Wesley. 2018. Reflections on (de)colonialism in language documentation.
Mannan, Motia & Tarekol Islam Maruf. 2025. The Impact of Globalization on Intercultural Communication and Education: A Qualitative Study. ABC Journal of Advanced Research 14. 1-14.
Ndzenyuiy, Melody N. & Heidi Keller. 2025. The Cultural Nature of Collaboration. In Paul F. M. J. Verschure (ed.), The Nature and Dynamics of Collaboration, 0. The MIT Press.
Speed, Laura J., Ewelina Wnuk & Asifa Majid. 2018. Studying psycholinguistics out of the lab. Research methods in psycholinguistics and the neurobiology of language: A practical guide. (Guides to research methods in language and linguistics.), 190-207. Hoboken, NJ, US: Wiley Blackwell.

Info

Tag: 14.11.2025
Anfangszeit: 14:00
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: M2.41
Track: Sonstiges
Sprache: en

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