Ontologizing (not: describing) language through epistemic practices: a case for critical epistemic pluralism

This contribution argues that language, as well as individual languages, are not autonomous objects merely described by epistemic practices. Rather, they are social phenomena brought into being – in other words, ontologized – through such practices. In the case of European standard languages, this is reflected in the process Auroux (1994) calls grammatisation, which was driven by professional language ontologizers and speakers alike and has contributed to the perception that languages are internally structured systems with fixed rules. To the extent that speakers orient to these ontologizations in their linguistic behavior, languages move closer to how they are imagined, through so‑called “looping effects.” Based on three case studies from tradition‑oriented Romance linguistics in German‑speaking academia (canonical structuralist analysis, the immediacy–distance continuum, and discourse traditions under the two‑historicity approach) it is argued that, while the system ontologization has dominated linguistics since its inception, it suffers from three pitfalls: naïve realism, the essentialist fallacy, and performativity blindness. To illustrate how alternative ontologizations can not only offer more realistic, situated accounts of language by building looping effects into the model, but also have more positive real‑world effects for speakers, two alternatives drawn from the wider social sciences are presented, namely the practice and the assemblage ontologizations. These are further illustrated in two case studies – the Real Academia Española’s position on gender‑inclusive language, and the revitalization of the Katsakati language in the Ecuadorian Amazon – that allow us to see how problematic real‑world effects of the system ontologization can be mitigated under a practice and an assemblage framework, respectively. Altogether, this shows the importance of maintaining a critical stance towards our epistemic practices, for which interdisciplinarity and epistemic plurality are especially helpful.