My career has been profoundly impacted by the diversity of the cultural and linguistic ecosystems in which I carried out fieldwork—from the Kalasha polytheists in the otherwise Muslim Hindu-Kush valleys of northern Pakistan to Cameroonian settings like the linguistically highly diverse Grassfields and the refugee communities from the Mandara mountains residing in the UNHCR camp of Minawao.
Since 2025, I have been Principal Investigator of an ELDP-funded project documenting Cinene and Dghwede in the language ecology of the UNHCR camp of Minawao, in Cameroon's Far North. Working in a refugee camp adds a layer of complexity that goes well beyond linguistics: I coordinate a 15-person, multi-ethnic field team, much of it managed remotely, since regular in-person access to the camp is restricted for security reasons and possible only at set times of year.
This project has also pushed me to think about documentation differently — not just as data collection, but as something that has to be usable by the community it concerns, on their terms and without depending on connectivity they don't have. That is what led me to design and build a network of offline Internet-in-a-Box servers, giving camp residents free access to recordings of their own elders and community members speaking their endangered languages — an effort that would not have been possible without the exceptional motivation of the project local team members and partnerships with Wiki Project Med, Thika Alumni Trust UK, and technical advisors Tim Moody and Shanti Bhardwa. More on this, and on how the infrastructure has since taken on a life of its own within the camp, on the Social Impact page.
Around the time I was defending my BA/MA thesis in Prehistoric Ecology and Historical-Comparative Linguistics (Italian Laurea Vecchio Ordinamento), I had the privilege of meeting Alberto and Augusto Cacopardo, two renowned anthropologists and leading experts on the pre-Islamic Hindu Kush. At that time, I was deeply immersed in Indo-European studies, and their extensive knowledge about the Kalasha—known as “the last Kafirs of the Hindu Kush”—was a tremendous source of inspiration.
Shortly after, I stumbled upon a book that felt as though it had been waiting for me for years on the dusty shelves of a second-hand bookstore in Brussels: Solstice païen by Jean-Yves Loude and Viviane Lièvre. This serendipitous discovery solidified my decision to pursue a PhD focusing on the Kalasha of Birir, the least studied branch of a once expansive cultural complex in northwest Pakistan.
My field-based dissertation earned the 2010 Firenze University Press “Best Humanities PhD Thesis” award. However, those were challenging years for the region, marked by political instability, which made it impossible to continue fieldwork for some time. While working in Cameroon, I remained dedicated to analyzing my Kalasha data, publishing research on their verbal art, phonology, and social organization as reflected in my field texts, as well as on comparative linguistics of the western Hindu-Kush.
Whether in Pakistan or, even more strikingly, in Cameroon, my fieldwork has consistently taken place in regions of remarkable linguistic diversity. When I began my work as a language documenter, my focus was shaped by what Tony Woodbury refers to as “ancestral languages.” In Pakistan, this meant concentrating exclusively on the Birir variety of Kalasha. Similarly, in my early years in Cameroon, I approached communities as an ethnographer, operating under the assumption that each language-specific group possessed a distinct set of cultural features warranting its classification as an “ethnolinguistic group.”
Such assumptions, deeply rooted in Western social science, seemed intuitive at the time. However, as I immersed myself in the complex realities of the field, it became clear that these frameworks often fell short of capturing the nuanced sociolinguistic dynamics I was observing.
For example, in the Cameroonian Grassfields, it is the norm—not the exception—for linguistically distinct chiefdoms to have been founded by groups of diverse origins. Similarly, individuals frequently navigate multiple sets of names, each tied to a specific kinship or kinship-like network. These networks often align with communities defined by distinct linguistic varieties and allegiance to sacred chiefs. Such social practices are but fragments of a broader sociolinguistic gestalt—one that has remained largely unexamined until recently.
This phenomenon has been described by many terms: egalitarian, organic, traditional, indigenous, rural, or small-scale multilingualism. I count myself among the early explorers of these historically recessive forms of multilingualism, alongside esteemed colleagues such as Friederike Lüpke and her Crossroads team, which includes Alex Cobbinah, Samantha Goodchild, Abbie Hantgan, Rachel Watson, and Mia Weidl, who have illuminated small-scale multilingualism in southern Senegal.
There remains much to uncover about small-scale multilingualism in African contexts. My initial work—collaborating with outstanding partners like Angiachi Esene Agwara, Rachel Ojong Diba, Jeff Good, and Ayu’nwi Neba—has only scratched the surface. Together, we have explored language ideologies, identity representations, research methods, and the implications of these forms of multilingualism for language change, language shift, and the emergence of special language registers. I am also proud to have been the primary editor of the first collection of studies on small-scale multilingualism primarily featuring African scholars. Yet, the deeper sociolinguistic complexities of these language ecosystems await further investigation.
These experiences have had a profound impact on my approach: they have not only reinforced the necessity of embracing multidisciplinarity to fully understand such complex realities but also inspired me to ensure that my work contributes meaningfully to the well-being of the socially and economically marginalized communities I collaborate with.
My deep commitment to multidisciplinary research manifested in both sole-author publications and a number of enriching collaborations, including with archaeologists (e.g. Giovanna Pizziolo), anthropologists (e.g. Alberto and Augusto Cacopardo), geographers (e.g. Ling Bian), computer scientists (e.g. Ian Chomicki), and specialists in public health (e.g. Katarzyna Kordas and Honoré Fon).
Select examples:
Pan, Yujia, Jiazhen Sun, Ling Bian, Pierpaolo Di Carlo & Jeff Good. 2024. “What Is Your Primary Language?”: Spatial Considerations of Primary Language Identification in a Multilingual Rural Region. The Professional Geographer, DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2024.2370264.
Di Carlo, Pierpaolo and Honore Fon. 2025. "Multilingualism and health equity for displaced populations". In Langues africaines et professionnalisation. Nouvelles contributions en linguistique du développement. Actes du Premier Colloque de l'Observatoire sur le Plurilinguisme Africain, University of Dschang (Cameroon), 13-15 December 2023. (manuscript)
Di Carlo, Pierpaolo, Bradley McDonnell, Lisa Vahapoglu, Jeff Good, and Katarzyna Kordas. 2022. "Public health information for minority linguistic communities". Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 100,1:78-80.
Di Carlo, Pierpaolo and Pizziolo, Giovanna. 2012. "Spatial reasoning and GIS in linguistic prehistory. Two case studies from Lower Fungom (Northwest Cameroon)". Language Dynamics and Change, 2: 150-183.
Di Carlo, Pierpaolo. 2011. "Lower Fungom linguistic diversity and its historical development: proposals from a multidisciplinary perspective". Africana Linguistica XVII: 39-86.