3 - The sociolinguistic interview

Summary

How do you conduct a sociolinguistic interview? How do you talk to your targeted speakers? This chapter will discuss ways and means of mitigating ‘the observer's paradox’, enabling the analyst to obtain natural speech data.

In the last two chapters, I have focused on setting up a research project, entering the speech community, and fieldwork ethics. Now, I turn to the question of how to collect appropriate data.

THE ‘INTERVIEW’

The basic tool for recording conversation in sociolinguistic variation is referred to as the ‘sociolinguistic interview’. In fact, this is a misnomer; a sociolinguistic interview should be anything but an ‘interview’.

MODULES

Labov (1984: 32) defines the sociolinguistic interview as ‘a well-developed strategy’ that is defined by a number of goals. The most important of these is to record one to two hours of speech and a full range of demographic data for each speaker within one's sample design. In Labov's (1984: 33–4) early formulation of the sociolinguistic interview, it was defined as a series of hierarchically structured sets of questions, what he refers to as conversational modules or ‘resources’ (Labov 1973).