Towards greater social anchoring in language typology

In this paper we make the case for the further social anchoring of linguistic typology by illustrating recent methodological developments in the field of comparative research on language contact. We begin by discussing similarities and differences between sociolinguistics and language typology and focusing on the issue of the social anchoring of research on language variation and linguistic diversity. We argue that while sociolinguistics is socially anchored by definition, linguistic typology has so far abstracted languages from their social contexts due to the nature of macro-comparison and the poor availability of data on sociolinguistic environments. We suggest that greater social anchoring in large-scale comparative research on language structures is possible and can be achieved through integrating two general aspects of language use, relationality and context-dependency, into typological models of language variation and change. We illustrate how data collection on bilingual language ecologies embodies the notion of relationality and context-dependency.