Collecting sociolinguistic data : some typical and some not so typical By : Donna Starks & Zita MeRobbie-Utasi

Summary:
The data of variation in language can be analyzed by questionnaires, interview, and polling. For the first time dialectologists used paper and pencil, and later tape recorders to research and record the difference pronunciation in the speech of rural habitants in many languages. The earlier dialectologists used postal questionnaires delivered by post to select individuals, and others employ the ‘on the spot phonetic transcription’ method, by moving around from country to another for gathering information. The earlier researcher inclined to focus to the older speakers (mostly males) who spend their whole time to live in the place where they were born. The researcher believed that these speakers had the most original and local language speech than the urban language. By the time dialect research has changed from a diachronic to a synchronic focus. The concerning has changed into the distribution and variation of certain lexical or phonological items in population centers, rural and urban alike. The secondary importance was the social background of the various dialect forms. More complex dialectology methods have been invented with increasing mobility and urbanization.
A changing in research techniques happened in 1996 by Labov. He said that urban speech was based on a study of 88 individuals from a socially stratified random sample. He established that variation in the speech of the individual was reflection of variation in the social group, and developed the sociolinguistic interview. The sociolinguistic interview goals at eliciting linguistic data in different speech context. It contains an informal part ( free conversation) for eliciting local language, and a formal part (reading passage, word lists and minimal pairs) to elicit various degrees of formal language use. He indicated nine contextual styles from casual to formal, and associated all nine types with channel cues (ie, cues that signal change from one style to another). The technique of inducing style shift on time, and has been widely used in sociolinguistic research. The sociolinguistic interviews usually begin with an informal free conversation and followed by increasingly formal language tasks. Free conversation goals at eliciting ‘natural speech’, while the formal interview is build to elicit specific data which do not occur during the course of the conversation.
The role of the interviewer becomes an important feature which is admitted in connection with the sociolinguistic interview. In 1997 a studying to examine interviewer accommodation was devised. The limitations of interview techniques in sociolinguistic must also be recognized although it has been admitted to be an effective tool for collecting sociolinguistic data. Some types of linguistic variant are difficult to collect by employing the method of sociolinguistic interview.
Many extensive huge-scale data collection techniques have been developed. Some of them employ a combination of short sociolinguistic interviews and more formal reading tasks. in 1996, Maclagan and Gordon use wordlists and sentences as data collection methods. The results show that sound changes happened at different rates in different words. The method of using the word-list polling technique are illustrated by research on regional variation undertaken by Horvarth. Postal questionnaires serve as another polling technique built to survey a number of speakers across large communities using the written medium. Now, postal questionnaires changed into the e-mail survey. It is found that the respondents often were prepared to provide detailed responses through the internet. The researcher also use in-person and telephone polling technique such as in United States and Canada. The telephone survey has been employed to create a dialect map of USA and Canada. Another frequently used polling method is the in-person rapid and anonymous survey where people are unaware that their speech are the object of study. By using it, it may be easy to observe the people in public places, such as streets, malls, and etc to take note the aspects of their speech. There are two types of this technique: the elicited and the unelicited type. Researcher observe the set of the speech events in the unelicited type. The elicited type is the second in-person rapid and anonymous survey. The recording of the rapid surveys also facilitates a comparison between the speech of the interviewer and interviewee.

 
Comment:

The ways of collecting sociolinguistic data stated in the article actually play important role to the main goal of sociolinguistic. Each ways has its own features from the very earlier method until the more recent one. The methods are mostly formally documented such as the postal questionnaires and word-list polling technique. It is stated in the article that the more recent methods to collect the sociolinguistic data is polling through the internet. I found on a website states that the use of digital speech corpora also can be the tool for collecting data. The quantitative study of linguistic variation is necessarily based upon empirical observation and statistical description of linguistic behavior. Another website says that the actual tools and methods have been largely passed on through ‘word of mouth’, rather than being formally documented. Although there are many different statement about the ways of how to collect the sociolinguistic data, but actually they are similar and almost same. The differences are only about the jargon that the author used. For instance I found a term ‘The semi-structured interview’ in other article, but here the author use “ free conversation” term. Actually both of the term are same. Both of them represent about a conversation which is use formal language structured preparation, but during the conversation an informal language could be done. This article has represented all the discussions about the methods collecting the data. Perhaps the author of this article just should add some more recent methods or tool, such as the use of digital speech corpora that I have been stated before. So far, this article help the students of linguistic to easy understand about the discussion, because the use of language and term is understandable.