Field linguists at work
Now that I've gotten around to
posting
suggestions of books that show linguists at work, correspondents
are writing to fill in gaps in my list. My list had a couple of
items depicting field linguistics, but I missed several good books
about field work.
Curtis Booth writes to nominate Leanne Hinton's wonderful collection of
essays on California Indian languages,
Flutes of Fire. To which
Peter Austin adds Paul Newman and Martha Ratliff's
Linguistic Fieldwork, a collection
of essays by a number of accomplished field linguists about all aspects
of the field experience, and Mark Abley's
Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened
Languages, specifically on working with endangered languages,
including revitalizing them.
For sociolinguistic fieldwork, I know of nothing quite like these
volumes about traditional field linguistics. My current best
recommendation is Penny Eckert's 1989 volume
Jocks and Burnouts, because it
treats both quantitative research and ethnographic description, and
because it's engagingly written.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 10, 2006 09:56 AM