This chapter deals with the methods of different types of fieldwork. Fieldwork can involve naturalistic, controlled or reported data; methods can be qualitative and/or quantitative, including elicitation, recording of spoken language and linguistic experiments. Still, even the most distinct types of fieldwork often make use of similar processes, such as recording metadata.

In this chapter, we will discuss the different methods employed in fieldwork. How you employ these methods largely depends on your goals. If your aim is to write a grammar, you may well use all of the methods. If your aim is to look at a particular structure in a well-described language, you may be able to get away with just one method.

Likewise, the timescale of your studies depends on what you are doing. For example, when conducting a pilot study (like the Somali study in 2.2) you may be able to collect your data in short sessions arranged to suit your and your speakers’ availability. When writing a grammar, some field linguists work with language teachers eight hours a day, seven days a week, the entire time that they are in the community. Others find that a less intensive schedule works better. It is up to you to find a way that works for you, your teachers and your project.

This chapter guides you through aspects of two very different fieldwork projects:

1. Fieldwork on the morphosyntax of an Amazonian language from Bolivia: how to begin extracting information about the grammar from spoken language

2. Fieldwork on the language contact situation between Somali and English among immigrants in the UK: how to set up a research project, and what to take into account before starting the data-collection

This is a first opportunity to learn about – and try out – some of the fieldwork techniques discussed in this book. It will be an introduction to many of the techniques and terms discussed in later chapters. These include text recording, elicitation and transcription in 1. and how to find speakers, use picture stories, use sociolinguistic questionnaires, apply for funding and ethics applications in 2.

Fieldwork project 1. Mosetén in Bolivia: text-collection, transcription, analysis and elicitation

In this chapter we will introduce the basic principles of text-collection, transcription, analysis and elicitation. These are the cornerstones of ‘prototypical fieldwork’, generally employed in describing the morphosyntax of a language in order to write a grammar, but aspects of these methods are present in all types of fieldwork.

In the present chapter, we want to address the issues that come up when preparing for different types of fieldwork. As this preparation is highly dependent on the setting of your work, some sections in this chapter will be more relevant to your particular situation than others.

The theme of this book is that fieldwork can be carried out in many different ways, ranging from prototypical fieldwork to less classical methods. Fieldwork settings can differ considerably, between going far away to staying close to home; conducting fieldwork on your own, with your family or in a group of researchers; working for long or short periods of time, and so on.

Yet, a considerable part of the chapter is concerned with preparing fieldwork in a remote place, because this type of fieldwork generally requires an additional layer of preparation. The first sections are concerned with preparation for any type of fieldwork, and it is important to consider whether you want to go far away, stay close to home, document a language or work on a specific structure. Altogether, careful preparation is the backbone of any type of fieldwork: it will help you to have strategies in place to deal with unexpected situations; make sure you cover the various aspects you are setting out to study; and will help you to avoid wasting your own, as well as the speakers’, time.

Linguistic fieldwork has as many histories as there are countries in which it has been carried out. And there is no global history of fieldwork (and virtually no local histories either). Nor is this the place to write one. This appendix focuses on the history of field research in Brazil and the USA, as examples of the kinds of issues, problems, and solutions faced by both individual field researchers and the general enterprise of field linguistics.

Arguably, field linguistics in the Americas, as field linguistics most places, began as an extension of colonial activity – specifically, missionary work. Let us first consider the case of Brazil, then move on to consider the USA.

This guide emerges from a combined forty years of field research in over two dozen languages of the Brazilian and Bolivian Amazon, Greenland and Europe, including immigrant languages in Europe. The authors have been teaching field methods courses and seminars in Brazil, the USA, the UK, Germany and Denmark. They have had the enjoyable experience of taking graduate students and seasoned linguists from Brazil, the USA, Israel, Germany and the Netherlands to the field in order to train them in fieldwork methods. The authors thoroughly enjoy the intense challenge of field research and the presentation of the lessons learned thereby to the international linguistics community. Many of the suggestions included within this guide are ones we wish someone had made to us before we began our field research careers.

This book is intended for upper-division undergraduates, graduate students and above. It can be used in class or for self study. The book presumes basic knowledge of most areas of linguistics. To lighten up the reading and make it more personal, we have added anecdotes from our own and others’ experience. Depending on what you are setting out to do (or learn), some sections will be more relevant than others, though generally all chapters should be of interest to the field researcher.

Are you ready to ‘go to the field’? This book is written to prepare you for a great adventure: to discover a language, to use the skills you have learnt studying linguistics to document, describe and analyse how people use language. Your adventure may take you far away to a place you never heard of before, or you may simply talk to your next door neighbour. Linguistic fieldwork can be many things!

Have you ever wondered why your neighbour, who speaks both Urdu and English, sometimes switches between the two within the same sentence? Or have you always wanted to work on an ‘exotic’ language in a far-flung place? Or are you interested in a particular linguistic theory and want to figure out whether a theoretical notion can be found in language? In all three cases, doing linguistic fieldwork would be a way of finding out. You could record people's speech, carry out linguistic experiments or ask the speakers questions about their language use. These methods can be used on their own or in combination with one another.

This chapter is about the languages studied, as well as the other languages used during fieldwork. Apart from the target language, which is the term we will be using for the language or languages under scrutiny, the other languages may include a lingua franca you and the speakers have in common. Of course, you may not need a lingua franca if you are conducting fieldwork in or on your native tongue, or you may choose to do monolingual fieldwork, in which case only the target language will be spoken in the fieldwork setting.

In the second part of the chapter we will discuss the advantages of learning the target language. Whether you analyse an aspect of a language, write a grammar or investigate a multilingual situation, some knowledge about the target language is very helpful prior to embarking on your study. That does not, by any means, imply that you have to be a native-like speaker of the language or languages in your study! In some cases, having access to grammars or other materials may suffice; in others you may learn the languages at the same time as carrying out your fieldwork. In the following sections we will explore differences in spoken and written data. Then we proceed to the challenges involved in working with small and large language groups, endangered languages versus viable languages and purely oral languages versus those with a rich literary tradition. The final part of this chapter deals with ways in which you can find a language or languages to work on.

In this chapter, we want to look at the possible outcomes of your fieldwork. These will depend on your individual project goals, and may include a fieldwork corpus, archiving and the publication of your results. We also look at writing grammars and dictionaries and compiling language documentation. Some outcomes of fieldwork have already been discussed elsewhere, for example developing materials for the language community (see 4.4.4).

The fieldwork corpus

Talking about corpora, you may think of the British National Corpus with its 100 million entries. Your fieldwork corpus will (almost definitely!) be very different: it is made up of the collection of your data, in general all of the transcribed or written materials, as well as your field notes. Spoken corpora also exist, as do corpora linking sound and text, which are made possible by programs such as ELAN, Toolbox or CLAN (see 6.3.1 and 6.3.3).

This chapter is about the people involved in fieldwork. You may think that these are the speakers and the linguist. They are indeed the main participants, to be discussed in detail in 4.1 and 4.2. Yet, there are other stakeholders to consider. For example, the (entire) language community, people associated with the language community – or area – in question, as well as third parties interested in your data or in the results of your study. When planning your fieldwork, it may be a good idea to consider which people could have an interest in your work, or what effect your work could have on the people involved. We will discuss these issues in section 4.3. Section 4.4 will be concerned with fieldwork ethics.

The speakers

One of the first tasks is to find speakers to work with. Not all speakers are equally suitable for fieldwork. While some speakers have intuitive linguistic knowledge, showing a great interest in your work, others find linguistic work challenging. At the same time, the latter may be great story tellers! Yet others have speech impediments such as missing front teeth, which can make it difficult to work on phonological issues. In general, working with a variety of speakers is usually a good idea, as different people are good at different things. Of course, the types of speakers you choose to work with greatly depend on the goals of your fieldwork project.