In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Sociolinguistic fieldwork by Natalie Schilling
  • James A. Walker
Sociolinguistic fieldwork. By Natalie Schilling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 313. ISBN 9780521127974. $36.99.

In contrast with other subfields of linguistics that rely on native-speaker intuition, grammaticality judgments, or laboratory experiments, conducting sociolinguistic research involves venturing into the field and satisfying two (potentially conflicting) goals: recruiting a representative sample of speakers, and obtaining recordings of their speech that are as close to ‘natural’ as possible (see e.g. Labov 1984). These considerations raise particular methodological and practical challenges that can be daunting, especially to students engaged in their first experience of sociolinguistic research. Those students lucky enough to study at a university that offers courses in sociolinguistic fieldwork are often confronted with lists of readings culled from different sources in linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and social psychology. In this book, Schilling draws on her many years’ experience in conducting sociolinguistic fieldwork in different communities in the United States, as well as her colleagues’ and students’ experiences in other locales, to offer a unified account of the steps involved in conducting sociolinguistic fieldwork, from research design, through speaker recruitment and data collection, to community advocacy and empowerment. Although her focus is on issues of relevance to fieldwork for the analysis of linguistic variation and change, the book is also intended to be useful for researchers in other areas of sociolinguistics. In Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–16), she begins by providing a brief history and overview of sociolinguistic fieldwork and outlining the structure of the book.

Ch. 2, ‘Designing the study’ (17–65), details the steps involved in designing a sociolinguistic research project. Because we cannot hope to include in the study every speaker in the speech community being studied, we have to develop a sample of speakers whose behavior can be generalized to the community, stratified for the locally relevant social distinctions that we want to test. As S points out, the traditional social categories (social class, sex/gender, ethnicity), in which ‘objectively’ measurable (‘etic’) categories have given way to explorations of subjective (‘emic’) social meaning, can create practical problems in sampling speakers. ‘Real-time’ studies of language [End Page 776] change (replications of earlier studies of the same community) need to consider whether the same speakers should be contacted again (a panel study) or whether a new sample of speakers should be recruited (a trend study), as well as whether the techniques or even the interviewers should be the same. Once the stratified sampling frame is developed, researchers need to decide whether to recruit speakers through random sampling, judgment sampling (filling cells through the friend-of-a-friend technique), or a mixture of the two.

Ch. 3, ‘Data-collection methods’ (66–133), addresses appropriate methods of collecting data for sociolinguistic research, in which the main challenge is overcoming the observer’s paradox—‘to observe how people talk when they are not being observed’ (Labov 1984:30)—since the fieldworker’s very presence may define a situation in which the type of linguistic behavior we are interested in observing is unlikely. While sociolinguistic surveys (used in dialectological studies), whether conducted face to face or remotely (by post, telephone, or internet), allow us to collect a large amount of data from many speakers, they heighten the observer’s paradox and do not approximate natural speech. Sociolinguistic fieldwork more commonly relies on the ‘sociolinguistic interview’ (unfortunately named, since, if successful, it should be as little like an interview as possible), in which the goal is to engage the speakers in natural interaction so that their attention is focused more on what they are saying than on how they are saying it. A great deal of thought and planning must be given to the structure of the interview and the types of questions asked, as well as to whether different tasks should take place during the interview to elicit stylistic variation. While acknowledging the criticisms leveled at the sociolinguistic interview, S situates it within a taxonomy of speech events and suggests modifications to suit the purposes of particular research questions and contexts. The sociolinguistic interview was developed as a less time-consuming alternative to collecting data through ethnographic observation (or...

pdf

Share