4 - Finding language consultants and working with them

Summary

Introduction

Linguistic fieldwork depends on work with speakers of the language being investigated. They are typically called “consultants,” sometimes “language teachers,” or “language helpers” or “assistants,” and now ever more increasingly “language experts.” Traditionally in linguistics and anthropology they were called “informants”; however, that term is avoided now. It sounded too much like “informer” or “police informant,” a snitch—something negative. So those who were formerly known as “informants” are called “language consultants” or just “consultants” in this book. This chapter is about finding language consultants and working with them.

A traditional view of fieldwork involved an academic researcher asking questions of a native speaker of the language that was the target of investigation, for the purpose of collecting data on that language, usually with the aim of describing at least some aspects of it, often with the larger goal of producing a grammar, dictionary, and collection of narrative texts. Today the investigators may still be regular academics, but can themselves also be native speakers of the language, or can be members of a team involving academic linguists and trained community members, often language activists, working together to document the language and to help communities with their language revitalization efforts or language education aspirations.

Obviously, fieldwork can have many other objectives beyond traditional language description, and a range of methods may be needed to achieve these differing aims. The object of fieldwork can be language acquisition (to find out about how children “acquire” [learn] their language), dialectology (determining the dialects and varieties of the language), historical linguistics (collection of data relevant to the history of the language and its relationship to other languages), sociolinguistics (investigation of socially conditioned variation in the language), language conservation and language reclamation (production of learning and teaching materials for community language projects and needs), phonetic and phonological documentation (investigation and analysis of the sounds and sound system of the language), documentation of endangered knowledge systems, TEK (documentation of traditional ecological knowledge) and ethnobotany, linguistic anthropology (understanding of language use in its cultural setting), ethnogeography, and many others.

Most of the fieldwork I have done was aimed at documenting the languages, though some cases had other objectives, including investigating the history of the languages involved.