Monolingual field methods: Applying Everett's (2001) 'Monolingual field research'to field training (original) (raw)

Both language documentation and field linguistics have been blossoming for the past two decades as awareness of the urgency of preserving the world’s linguistic diversity has increased in the linguistic community. An integral part of language conservation is fieldwork, hence the importance of preparing linguists and speech community members interested in fieldwork through field methods courses. Unfortunately, “those few departments that do teach field methods never offer courses in monolingual fieldwork, even though such training is necessary for research on many endangered languages” (Everett 2001:169). In this talk, I will argue in favour of monolingual field methods courses with more than one language consultant as the preferred method for fieldwork training. My discussion will be based on Everett’s (2001) “Monolingual field research” and will explore how his arguments in favour of carrying out fieldwork monolingually also apply to field methods courses. This analysis will draw on a field training course taught at the 2010 Institute on Field Linguistics and Language Documentation. The talk will be structured in the following way: (1) Language consultants, (2) Conduct and substance of the work sessions, and (3) Disadvantages and advantages of the monolingual method. In each of the proposed sections, I will discuss the key points of Everett’s article and how they applied to my personal (and team) experience at InField 2010 by means of elicitation examples, props used in class, and general class anecdotes. References: Everett, Daniel L. 2001. Monolingual field research. In Linguistic Fieldwork, ed. by Paul Newman and Martha Ratliff, 166-188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.