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Choosing a Language

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Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork

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Abstract

Even before fieldwork preparation (which will be dealt with in Chapter 5), it is necessary to choose a language to work on. However, the choice of language may well be out of the hands of the researcher. The language ultimately chosen for fieldwork may be suggested by an advisor or senior linguist (Section 4.1) or, due to special circumstances, a language community might request a researcher to conduct fieldwork on their language (Section 4.2). The situation where the researcher has the chance to choose a language by himself/herself, a case perhaps not as common as one might believe, will be treated in Section 4.3.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is important to work on a language with input from linguists interested in and informed about the same language family. If a fieldworker wants to write a doctoral thesis based on fieldwork on a particular language, it is usually required that there be a professor or reader on the committee who specializes in that language family. In some institutions, the same requirement might hold for master’s theses as well.

  2. 2.

    As we will see in Chapter 6, it is generally not a good idea to ask one’s spouse to be one’s fieldwork consultant; distant relatives are better. So if the only person the aspiring fieldworker wants to work with is his/her target-language-speaking spouse, s/he had better consider it carefully, and might try to find other speakers not related to him/her.

  3. 3.

    See Section 11.3.2 for discussion of the term polysynthetic.

  4. 4.

    Over the years, this series has been called Routledge Language Family Descriptions, Routledge Curzon Language Family Descriptions, and Curzon Language Family Descriptions.

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  1. University of North Texas, Denton, TX, 76203-1307, USA

    Shobhana L. Chelliah & Willem J. de Reuse

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  1. Shobhana L. Chelliah
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Correspondence to Shobhana L. Chelliah .

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Chelliah, S.L., de Reuse, W.J. (2010). Choosing a Language. In: Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9026-3_4

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