Tape/Text and Analogues

Abstract

URING THE PAST TWENTY YEARS the portable tape recorder has emerged as a basic instrument in the study of regional and social dialects, so that today its presence is one of those casually accepted facts of linguistic fieldwork. The machine has become standard equipment for dialectology in the Gillieron tradition and an indispensible tool for sociolinguistic investigation of speech variables. The increased popularity of sociolinguistics and the refinement of its procedures evenly parallel the technical evolution of the tape recorder, as engineers took the best characteristics of a cumbersome laboratory apparatus and developed a convenient and responsive field instrument.' Systematic inquiry into linguistic performance in its sociohistorical context-whether designated linguistic geography or sociolinguistics-has thus accelerated at such an extraordinary rate that interpretive scholarship can scarcely track the research or integrate the findings in summary fashion.2 For conventional linguistic geography (that is, the approach to the investigation of linguistic performance initiated by Gillieron and refined by Jaberg, Jud, and Kurath), the current use of the tape recorder is particularly complicated because it must be reconciled with traditional aims and methods. Those methods have provided European and North American linguists with the best available information-the most nearly complete, consistent, and concise statements-about regional and social variation in human speech. The effective use of lightweight and sensitive recording equipment has brought obvious changes to the procedures of data-gathering by introducing techniques that are tacitly accepted today as matters of convenience. The implications of the new method of collecting information,