In Kampala, speakers from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds come together from different regions of Uganda and beyond. Encounters in the capital are therefore marked by shifting linguistic practices that challenge normative, long-standing ideologies and attitudes. Repertoires are being developed and pruned. Proficiency becomes a contextual, short-term marker of belonging or distinction. While research on linguistic differentiation often leads to the elaboration of dichotomies of speakers (minorities/dominant groups, natives/others), I will show that speakers' otherness can be a contextual and temporally framed norm and part of the everyday practice of differentiation.

Sociolinguistic research has always considered language use as an essential practice through which speakers differentiate themselves and others, seeing language as both a marker and a means of marking identity, belonging and difference. Since the linguistic turn, we are looking at linguistic disorder, creativity and innovation more than ever. We observe that ideological conceptions of speakers and their language practices are not as clear-cut as they once seemed. And yet we try to seek order in speakers and their languaging practices. We dare to judge: What is ordinary and what is innovative? We try to identify: Who or what represents the norm and who or what deviates from it? In this talk, I argue that we should not ask who and what, but when and where, to enable representative research on the epistemologies of language.

Through anecdotal examples of speakers' linguistic choices, narratives and metalinguistic negotiations, this study shows how speakers in Uganda continuously adapt their linguistic practices to particular interactional situations and how, as a result, representations of the Other circulate between speakers depending on temporal and spatial circumstances. Qualitative data was collected using ethnographic methods (semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, participant observation) during several months in Kampala between 2021 and 2023.