This article is a linguistic, anthropological and philosophical examination of language, with special focus on language contact. The aim is not to handle linguistic phenomena from a descriptive viewpoint, in the classical sense of the term, nor as if they were a “given”, and nothing farther. Nor is the aim to craft a model. Instead it is an effort to account for all pertinent elements which (empirically) come into play in plain language use, regarding them both in terms of language dynamics and in terms of language use; this essentially involves considering people's own practices, as communication actors and knowledge builders. People are ever stakeholders in this play (and its plays) because we are the ones who distinguish and/or attribute relevance. In other words, this text is a reflection on the (our) frameworks established through communication practices (frameworks which naturally have an impact on the form of our tools, including languages!) It highlights that the objectivization of phenomena which underlies our practices (whether academic or not) is closely dependent on the means by which we grasp the phenomena—this is nothing new but is worth noting afresh. Methodologically speaking, observing this point is an essential element in the elaboration of a theory to account for how phenomena are empirically grasped, and more particularly what it entails in the field of ‘language contact’.