Social Linguistics is defined as the study of languaging, with primary account to the social life of the people whose languaging experience is the object of scientific focus. Why such pragmatic move if science is thought to operate context-free, and if scientific thruth owes its validity from abstractness and universality?

The answer is that, while scientific thruth holds independently of time and space, incentives for seeking such truth are always historically, politically, geographically an socially motivated. Scientific research cannot do without funding provided by interest stakeholders be they individuals, private or public institutions; thus the inevitable bias of scientific agenda. This is true of the study of the human language experience in Africa, where the portfolio of linguistics research have fluctuated, from overtly colonialist language policies to present-time data-drilling funding programmes in language documentation, through structuro-linguistics, without tangible impact on the social life of the peoples who identify with these frames of  language experiences.

Language is at the heart of the human social experience; and language experiences abound in Africa, which testifies to the diversity of responses that human groups were induced to deliver in the face of the challenging structural coupling (Maturana & Varela 1987) between their social existence and the outside world.

Social Linguistics is a reactionary stance to colonial and neo-colonial linguistics, without compromising the necessary rigor of scientific enterprise; it seeks to develop an understanding of the humanity languaging exprience with case-studies in multilingual Africa, whereby verbal behaviors are investigated as toolboxes (Everett 2012) that human have engineered for their survival. In this connexion, a verbal tool can only be pragmatically understood if put in relation with the social and historical conditions under which it has emerged. The study of verbal tools should therefore encompass, at least to some degree, an agenda that aims at ensuring the continuity of the social experience which breeds them that is, people’s welfare.