Before You Record Anything Else: Topics and Questions to Consider When You Interview a Speaker for the First Time

Abstract

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in field linguistics and language documentation. One reflection of this trend is the appearance of several relatively new books about doing linguistic fieldwork (e.g. Newman and Ratliff 2001, Vaux and Cooper 1999, Payne 1997). Yet, there remains one area of fieldwork methodology that is rarely dealt with in publications and linguistic field methods courses generally: how and why a linguist should gather information about the life history of the speaker, including, especially, information about the speaker's sociolinguistic background. Such information is critical for linguists investigating moribund languages, where it is not uncommon to find significant differences in the speech of speakers who belong to the same family, let alone the same speech community. The reasons behind such differences become clearer if the linguist first determines what sociolinguistic factors, in the speaker's personal history, have affected that speaker's knowledge and use of the language in question.