Over the last decade, citizen science (CS), i.e. “participation of nonprofessional contributors in the production of scientific knowledge”, has gained momentum across disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences. CS associations, networks, and labs have been established, and a specialized journal, Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, was launched in 2014. Further, there is an ongoing standardization of CS methods, and various toolkits have been developed. Since 2016, CS is recognized by the European Commission as one out of eight open science priorities, and the United Nations highlights the importance of CS as a way to monitor and achieve the sustainable goals.
In sociolinguistics, the call for an epistemological turn toward greater citizen involvement in research is not new. However, the emergence of CS in sociolinguistics under the banner citizen sociolinguistics is recent. In this paper, I present data on language diversity among young people in Norway from former and ongoing CS projects. I discuss the affordances and challenges of CS in general and of citizen sociolinguistics in particular, focusing on recruitment, ethics, data collection, efficacy and validity. In this discussion, I critically engage with what can be called the recent CS ‘hype’ across scientific disciplines and in research policy programs, and argue that there is a need for studies on the impact of CS, for instance the extent to which CS can lead to empowerment and/or democratization, as it is often stated. Further, I demonstrate that the recent CS paradigm shift, including citizen sociolinguistics, is largely United States– Europe based. Hence, I argue that there is a need to incorporate a global perspective to capture for instance the “myriad ways that people talk about their lived experience of language across the globe in a variety of contexts with varying degrees of online access and literacy, as well as under different political regimes” (cf. Svendsen & Goodchild 2021: 4).