Triangulation and trilingualism

Abstract

Abstract My study concerns the urban vernacular ‘Leewarders’ and the two other languages spoken in Leeuwarden Dutch and Frisian. The description of the communicative function of the urban vernacular in relation to those languages is intended to be a contribution to the sociology of language in the tradition of Multilingualism in the Barrio by Joshua Fishman et al. (1971). My study is executed by means of several methods and techniques: interviewing, a survey, a variant of the matched‐guise experiment and participant observation. The approach of investigating the same phenomenon from different methodical angles is known as triangulation. The idea behind this approach is that every single method has got its own merits and demerits. The outcome from dissimilar measurements of the object can be mutually compared and together they lead to more reliable results. I will try to illustrate this by comparing a selection of a preliminary outcome obtained by four different methods. An additional goal of my paper is t...