Researching Naturally Occurring Speech

Abstract

Studies have shown that characteristics of interviewers and the interview itself may affect data from sociolinguistic fieldwork. Thus, the challenge for linguists who study language in its social context is to devise a methodology that allows them to record the everyday linguistic behavior of their informants, i.e., the casual, unmonitored speech that normally occurs outside of sociolinguistic interviews. This article discusses such an approach that adapts ethnographic methods to sociolinguistic fieldwork. This approach allows for recording natural linguistic interaction and allows fieldworkers to witness, participate in, and record speech events typically absent from sociolinguistic interviews.