Fieldwork in Language Contact Situations

Abstract

Few communities are wholly linguistically homogeneous and completely isolated from their neighbors. There is great variety in the extent of language and dialect contact in different communities, and therefore consideration of language contact is important in fieldwork and language documentation. However, fieldwork focused on individual speech varieties (or languages) has tended to see multilingualism as a problem rather than an opportunity, as a source of contamination of the data under consideration rather than something to study in its own right (see, for example, Vaux and Cooper 1999:8, and the argument in Aikhenvald to appear). Such a view is understandable in the context of the wish to describe a single standard linguistic variety and to produce materials which are representative of the language as a whole. Trying to get an accurate picture of language contact in a community may also make the research project considerably more complex; conversely, excluding contact means excluding potentially relevant data. While there are numerous ways in which aspects of language contact impinge on fieldwork and language description, in this chapter I concentrate on three different ways in which language contact and multilingualism are relevant to fieldwork (and

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