Community-Based Sociolinguistics: Data Collection in School and Neighborhood Settings

Overview

This one-day workshop will focus on describing and reinvigorating traditional community-based sociolinguistic methods in modern research. It builds on the strong history of research on language variation and change by revisiting the methods pioneered by scholars such as Labov, Wolfram, Eckert, and others in the mid-late 20th century. Recent years have seen increasing demand for sociolinguistics as part of the linguistics curriculum at colleges and universities across the world, but the training students receive may not necessarily be grounded in the methods of community-based fieldwork on which the discipline was founded. Additionally, time and funding constraints make working with non-corpus digital resources (e.g., social and digital media) appealing for student research at both undergraduate and graduate levels. The situation was likely exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic which necessitated remote data collection, which provides its own valuable insights into language production and processing, but represents further separation from fieldwork within local communities.  As a result, many of today’s students of sociolinguistics (and future generations) will not receive training on how to enter and collaborate with local communities in ways that enrich our understanding of language in use, based on linguistic analysis on non-documentary data, collected through sociolinguistic interviews. Despite these difficulties, large-scale community projects such as Michigan Diaries, Voices of California, and the Chicagoland Project represent examples of recent large-scale local sociolinguistic descriptions. Organized by Drs. Nicole Holliday and Sabriya Fisher, coPIs on the project, “Don’t Take That Tone With Me: Linguistic Variation and School Experience”, this workshop aims to share these methods with students and researchers across institutions, and allow attendees to share strategies and best practices for community and school-based research.