This chapter reflects on my experiences of conducting interviews with staff from development organisations in Kyrgyzstan about the role of languages and culture in their work. These thirty-four semistructured interviews, conducted in January 2018, were collected for a case study as part of a larger project that aimed to raise the profile of languages in the development sector, and particularly in contexts in which international NGOs claim to listen to their so-called beneficiaries. The theoretical concept of ‘listening’ was central to the project. In this chapter, I describe how I used the concepts of listening and of linguistic hospitality (Ricoeur 2006) to reflect on my own linguistic practices as a translation studies scholar, who visited Kyrgyzstan as an outsider from a privileged background and who did not speak the local languages but worked with an interpreter. I demonstrate that using these concepts helped me to gain insights into the personal, institutional and sociopolitical issues that influenced my linguistic choices and assumptions. To conclude, I offer practical recommendations for researchers that can help in designing, delivering and reporting on multilingual research in a more linguistically equitable way.