engleski

Sweatsuit, recorder, and ‘broken Croatian’: methodological challenges of the sociolinguistic interview and participant observation

The sociolinguistic interview and participant observation (Labov 1984, Tagliamonte 2006) are classical fieldwork methods which nonetheless keep spurring researchers to critical (self-)reflection. This presentation will focus on some of the fieldwork challenges which arose during the author’s research into the bilingualism of a four-person Croatian immigrant family who have lived in Toronto, Canada since 1974. It will address the following issues: 1) how do we elicit respondents’ ‘spontaneous’ production (to access their vernacular) in the non-spontaneous interview situation with asymmetrical power relations, and how do we assess the role of the researcher as a factor which influences respondents’ responses on several levels, 2) how much of the research design should we share with respondents, considering its possible influence on their production, 3) how do we approach those results in which respondents' responses differ from what has been observed by the researcher, and 4) should we allow respondents to listen to the recorded material if they ask to? Since this type of research necessarily makes the researcher part of the situation which is the object of their study, the decisions which they make about these issues will be reflected in the research results. This kind of influence or incorporation into the results is unavoidable, but we can become better aware of it and take it into consideration when analyzing the data. For example, in order to gain easier access to respondents’ informal and ‘spontaneous’ production, the researcher must reflect on factors including their own behavior, the varieties of their own production, respondents’ knowledge about the researcher’s linguistic repertoire, the degree of (extra)linguistic accommodation to respondents, the social role in which they are perceived by respondents, as well as the place where interviews are carried out. In bilingual fieldwork situations, respondents might feel that code-mixing and code-switching are not legitimate forms of language production and will need clarification on some basic linguistic views on bilingual varieties, which might in turn influence their production. In some cases respondents will express attitudes and give information about themselves or others which will not correspond to what has been observed by the researcher, which requires the researcher to take care not to provoke respondents’ discomfort with their feedback. Finally, respondents will sometimes wish to listen to the recorded interview material and the researcher must make a decision whether they will allow this and to what extent, especially since respondents might not react to their own or others’ recorded production and views in a positive manner. All of these challenges are open issues which call for discussion.

fieldwork; bilingualism; code-switching; sociolinguistic interview; participant observation; ideology of the standard language; monoglossic ideology

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