Assembling agencies on a website: interactions among language, sports and knowledge

Abstract In this article we reflect on the process used to create the website euskarakirolkide.eus , which emerged from an ethnographic study involving youth sports in the Basque Autonomous Community. The website documents some of the strategies used by sports clubs to promote the use of the Basque language not only within the clubs but also in the wider context of neighborhood and city, illustrating how the clubs serve as language agents by giving voice, body and materiality to their practices. The euskarakirolkide.eus website also details and exhibits the careful research process undertaken and the complex interplay between the material and relational elements involved. We argue that the website’s dual function—a showcase for the sociolinguistic work done by the clubs and a vehicle for the generation of knowledge—transforms it into a methodological-epistemological tool that has agency. Euskarakirolkide.eus shows the linguistic work done by the clubs, respecting their ways of understanding and managing the languages, while also proposing a participatory ethnography model that is attuned to the needs of the context in which it is applied. In this sense, the webpage emerges as an assemblage, that is, a power and agency which seeks, through doing-together, to promote a sociolinguistics that is concerned with the survival of a minoritized language like Basque.