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Field Linguistics: A Beginner's Guide
Crowley's voice of experience brings us the best practical fieldwork guide to date. Sensible, frank, and comprehensive, this book prepares beginning field workers for the rigours ahead and will save years of costly trial and error. N. J. Enfield
This book is a comprehensive, practical guide to field linguistics. It deals in particular with the problems arising from the documentation of endangered languages. Deploying a mixture of methodology and practical advice and drawing on his own immense experience, Terry Crowley shows how to record, analyse, and describe a language in the field. He covers the challenges and problems the researcher is likely to encounter, offers guidance on issues ranging from ethics to everyday diplomacy, and provides full discussions of corpus elicitation, how to keep track of data, salvage fieldwork, dealing with unexpected circumstances, and many other central topics. "We all learn by our mistakes," he writes, "and I have plenty of my own to share with you."
This book is a comprehensive, practical guide to field linguistics. It deals in particular with the problems arising from the documentation of endangered languages. Deploying a mixture of methodology and practical advice and drawing on his own immense experience, Terry Crowley shows how to record, analyse, and describe a language in the field. He covers the challenges and problems the researcher is likely to encounter, offers guidance on issues ranging from ethics to everyday diplomacy, and provides full discussions of corpus elicitation, how to keep track of data, salvage fieldwork, dealing with unexpected circumstances, and many other central topics. "We all learn by our mistakes," he writes, "and I have plenty of my own to share with you."
- GenresLinguistics
218 pages, Hardcover
First published January 18, 2007
3 people are currently reading
29 people want to read
About the author
Terry Crowley
34 books7 followersTerry Crowley (1953-2005) was a linguist specializing in Oceanic languages, as well as Bislama, the English-lexified Creole recognized as a national language in Vanuatu. From 1991 till his death, he was a professor at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Previously, he was with the Pacific Languages Unit of the University of the South Pacific in Vanuatu (1983–90) and with the Department of Language and Literature at the University of Papua New Guinea (1979–83).
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 17, 2011
An entertaining and pleasant introduction to Field Linguistics, with lots of good advice about ethics, practicalities, community relations, and methodology. I'd definitely assign this to my students taking field methods.
It isn't the total solution to a field methods class, however. It lacks discussion of modern Data management (it mainly reflects older technologies), and it doesn't really have a comprehensive list of what you should cover when doing field work. Crowley admits that he isn't going to do this because it will depend largely on the language and language family being studied. I still think some sample questionnaires would have been helpful.
Crowley is clearly the kind of field linguist who believes that if you haven't had Malaria, slept in a canoe and eaten bugs then you aren't a field linguist. He's fairly disdainful of urban fieldwork and of fieldworkers who work in western environments. This got on my nerves a bit, since working on endangered languages in these settings can be -- if done correctly just as valuable, if speakers are available.
The author, sadly, died before the completion of the book. It was published posthumously, as a result I felt that it lacked some polish that the author presumably would have put on the finalized manuscript. For example, there are a couple of places where the same advice and the same story are repeated. Another sad part is that the author reveals that he was working on a grammar of the Tape language spoken in Vanuatu while writing this. One wonders what happened to all his materials on this language.
Overall, I quite enjoyed reading this though. The style is conversational and the author is clearly an expert. People considering doing field work should definitely give it a once over.
It isn't the total solution to a field methods class, however. It lacks discussion of modern Data management (it mainly reflects older technologies), and it doesn't really have a comprehensive list of what you should cover when doing field work. Crowley admits that he isn't going to do this because it will depend largely on the language and language family being studied. I still think some sample questionnaires would have been helpful.
Crowley is clearly the kind of field linguist who believes that if you haven't had Malaria, slept in a canoe and eaten bugs then you aren't a field linguist. He's fairly disdainful of urban fieldwork and of fieldworkers who work in western environments. This got on my nerves a bit, since working on endangered languages in these settings can be -- if done correctly just as valuable, if speakers are available.
The author, sadly, died before the completion of the book. It was published posthumously, as a result I felt that it lacked some polish that the author presumably would have put on the finalized manuscript. For example, there are a couple of places where the same advice and the same story are repeated. Another sad part is that the author reveals that he was working on a grammar of the Tape language spoken in Vanuatu while writing this. One wonders what happened to all his materials on this language.
Overall, I quite enjoyed reading this though. The style is conversational and the author is clearly an expert. People considering doing field work should definitely give it a once over.
March 23, 2018
3.5 stars. An entertaining read, but neither a "how-to" nor a "how-I-did-it" book, and would have been better if more focused. Lots of good anecdotes about his own fieldwork, both successful and not so much!
July 7, 2011
Terry Crowley was an Australian linguist who specialized in languages of the Pacific, especially those spoken in Vanuatu. Over his career he had done a great deal of fieldwork, and he distilled his experiences into FIELD LINGUISTICS: A Beginner's Guide. He had more or less completed the book before his untimely death in 2005, and Nick Thieberger saw it through the press.
FIELD LINGUISTICS covers the basics of ethics, how to find informants and solicit data, and how to organize one's material. The book has some strong points, notably Crowley's recommendations on ways to give back to the community. The local community should get some immediate benefit from a visiting linguist's work, such as children's primers. Crowley also cautions fieldworkers that they should be super-polite and respect local customs, so that data is easier to gather and future fieldworkers will be made welcome. There's more advice on how to deal with officialdom, often suspicious of researchers, than other introductions to the field.
However, Crowley writes in a folksy tone that tends to go on and on, and I came to think that FIELD LINGUISTICS could have been cut down to a mere 100 pages without being any less useful. Certainly the long opening section about why linguists should do fieldwork should have been cut. Most likely, any student picking up the book already knows about the value of fieldwork to linguistics (documenting hitherto unresearched languages, building a corpus, etc.), so there's no need to sell them on the idea of fieldwork, but rather just teach them how to do it.
This book should ideally have been a smaller pamphlet instead of a pricey book with a lot of unnecessary fluff. If you have access to this book at your institution, there's much to learn, but it's hard to recommend a purchase.
FIELD LINGUISTICS covers the basics of ethics, how to find informants and solicit data, and how to organize one's material. The book has some strong points, notably Crowley's recommendations on ways to give back to the community. The local community should get some immediate benefit from a visiting linguist's work, such as children's primers. Crowley also cautions fieldworkers that they should be super-polite and respect local customs, so that data is easier to gather and future fieldworkers will be made welcome. There's more advice on how to deal with officialdom, often suspicious of researchers, than other introductions to the field.
However, Crowley writes in a folksy tone that tends to go on and on, and I came to think that FIELD LINGUISTICS could have been cut down to a mere 100 pages without being any less useful. Certainly the long opening section about why linguists should do fieldwork should have been cut. Most likely, any student picking up the book already knows about the value of fieldwork to linguistics (documenting hitherto unresearched languages, building a corpus, etc.), so there's no need to sell them on the idea of fieldwork, but rather just teach them how to do it.
This book should ideally have been a smaller pamphlet instead of a pricey book with a lot of unnecessary fluff. If you have access to this book at your institution, there's much to learn, but it's hard to recommend a purchase.
January 16, 2012
A very interesting and helpful book, full of personal examples to relate to the matters being discussed. Practical knowledge and experience combined with advice, guidelines and basic information make this a great basic idea of how to begin field work in linguistics.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews