Essentials of Language Documentation
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Chapter 2 – Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis 51
tacts, (avoiding) cold calls, community, and compensation. Much of this section is designed to be employed as a checklist in advance of field re- search.
3.1. Criteria
Four criteria generally dictate a researcher’s initial decision about research location and variety: With which communities and language variety do I work?
– Linguistic diversity and/or conservativeness If you have the freedom to choose the language variety you will work on, your linguistic criteria for deciding may be typological (language x is unusual or typologically interesting in some way), and/or that the va- riety preserves an earlier stage of the language very well.
expediency Certain places may be open or closed to your research team for reasons of regional or national security. Local authorities may prefer that you go to only certain places, for reasons of personal safety or “turf.” 12
– Logistical expediency It may be only practical to combine work in a limited number of re- gions, if one is working in remote or inaccessible places. This logistical limitation may require the linguist to redefine the theoretical or scien- tific goals of the project.
Certain language varieties may already be dominated by a national re- searcher of great stature, who would resent the competition you repre- sent (see political expediency above). Conversely, certain villages have no such reservations, but they either lack a sufficient number of consult- ants who are able to produce the phenomenon under investigation, or the local research talent on your team knows more people somewhere else.
52 Arienne M. Dwyer 3.2. Contacts – Native speaker-consultants Of all your contacts, consultants are the most important, and are best found via introductions from intermediaries. Creating the conditions for introductions requires patience, as establishing a consultant-researcher relationship is usually only possible after a period of trust-building with intermediaries. 13
and crucial to any research project. Rather than zeroing in on a single consultant for the entire research, most projects benefit from a pool of consultants, so as to avoid inadvertently producing a study of for exam- ple one person’s peculiar idiolect, or a study of male language. 14 Work-
ing with a number of consultants allows the researcher to draw on each consultant’s strengths, and also to correlate sociolinguistic parameters such as sex, age, place of origin and languages spoken with linguistic parameters. – Academics
Scholars based in the country or region in question are often a crucial aid to jump-starting our research. We often rely on their prior work, even if only in a related field, e.g. local history. Discussions with these scholars can give you the lay of the land, and may yield valuable con- tacts.
As these relationships, are also based on equitable exchange, it is im- portant that the outsider-investigator offers something genuinely useful to such scholars, e.g. copies of publications, offers of academic collabora- tion, and/or volunteering to send hard-to-find books from overseas. It may or may not be appropriate to include some academics in your project.
Although most bureaucrats in any country seem to have been put on this earth to hamper research, some can be surprisingly helpful. Brace your- self for the worst while maintaining a pleasant and undemanding demean- or. On the occasion when they are helpful, one is pleasantly surprised. Officials are of course often crucial in obtaining research permission; and they may provide valuable (or dreadful) introductions. In some cases it may be better to keep them abreast of project developments only Chapter 2 – Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis 53
in the vaguest way – for often these contacts are very political, and could hamper the project or even endanger consultants, depending on local conditions.
– Local people (non-native speakers) Other local people outside of the target language group often provide an etic-emic perspective (outsider-insider) on the group you are actually investigating. They can constitute an important control group for a so- ciolinguistic or language-contact investigation. 15
– A long-term view of contacts It is not an exaggeration to suggest that if you are an outsider-re- searcher, that you plan to continue returning to communities for several decades if you really want successful and mutually satisfying research results. Even though in many cases these iterative visits are impractical, maintaining contact is desirable. From the view of western academia, repeated field research in the same community is unfortunately not yet encouraged; in fact, many aca- demics are under pressure to do precisely the opposite, undertaking many different projects for typological comparison or for demonstrating “scholarly breadth.” Yet depth – the thorough understanding of a par- ticular language family or area and an ability to speak and think in its languages – is often sacrificed for breadth. Recent developments, lead by endangered-language linguists and an- thropologists, indicate a trend toward depth and breadth. The key is to work cooperatively with speaker communities and with other scholars. In this way, one can undertake diverse projects and continue to work with previous communities.
3.3. (Avoiding) “cold calls” 16
If a researcher has no connections to the community, region, or even coun- try, her work is very difficult – people will understandably mistrust her, she’ll spend a lot of time explaining what she’s doing and attempting to build trust among some members of a community. Basically, successful initial fieldwork planning is about avoiding this situation, by being intro- duced by an individual or individuals and building trust – however tenu- ously – with a community.
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