The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted not only how linguistic fieldwork is conducted but also how university-level field methods courses are taught. In this paper, we detail the methodology utilized during the 2020-21 academic year by the University of Hawai?i at Manoa Department of Linguistics for the entirely remote Field Methods sequence…

The purpose of this research is to support the language revitalization and reclamation of Nuu-wee-ya', a Dene language from Southern Oregon and Northern California, and to contribute to the discussions on methodological particularities of archive-based research for language revitalization. Nuu-wee-ya' is a sleeping language comprising three…

In this paper, I discuss methodological and ethical issues that arose in the process of documenting lexical variation in Yucatec Maya Sign Languages (YMSLs). YMSLs are indigenous sign languages used by deaf and hearing people in Yucatec Maya villages with a high incidence of deafness in the peninsula of Yucatán, Mexico. The documentation of rural…

Mobile apps have the potential to support collaborative fieldwork even where web connectivity is unreliable or unavailable. To explore this potential, we developed portable network infrastructure and custom-made field tool apps. We deployed this solution in remote communities in the far north of Australia, in connection with co-located cooperative…

Communities around the world have distinctive ways of representing language use across space and territory. The approach to and method of mapping languages that began with nineteenth-century European dialectology and colonial boundary making is one such way. Though practiced by relatively few linguists today, language mapping has developed…

Language documentation efforts are most often concerned with the adult language and usually do not include the language used by and with children. Essential parts of the natural linguistic behaviour of communities thus remain undocumented, and a growing body of literature explores what language documentation, language maintenance, and language…

Working with video data is on its way to becoming standard practice in language documentation. However, documenters looking on the web for guidance on standards and best practices for archiving audio-visual data encounter a vast and potentially confusing diversity of information. Unfortunately, a lot of information on archiving video is concerned…

The goal of the paper is to demonstrate how sociolinguistic research can be applied to endangered language documentation field linguistics. It first provides an overview of the techniques and practices of sociolinguistic fieldwork and the ensuring corpus compilation methods. The discussion is framed with examples from research projects focused on…

Documenting sociolinguistic variation in lesser-studied languages presents methodological challenges, but also offers important research opportunities. In this paper we examine three key methodological challenges commonly faced by researchers who are outsiders to the community. We then present practical solutions for successful variationist…

Working with speakers of endangered languages often involves developing a deep rapport with the eldest members of a community. These relationships present unique challenges that include navigating great losses--not only of the language of study, but, more profoundly, the attendant death of its speakers. This essay is motivated by the recognition…

Language documentation and description are closely related practices, often performed as part of the same fieldwork project on an un(der)-studied language. Research trends in recent decades have seen a great volume of publishing in regards to the methods of language documentation, however, it is not clear that linguists' awareness of the…

Song is a universal human phenomenon that can shed much light on the nature of language. Despite this, field linguists are not always equipped with the knowledge and skills to analyze song texts and draw out their significances to other areas of language. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for a language community to ask linguists working in the…

Although Laura Robinson and James Crippen disagree strongly with a number of Bowern and Warner's [see EJ1075309] characterizations of their own paper ["In Defense of the Lone Wolf: Collaboration in Language Documentation" v7 p123-135 2013], Robinson and Crippen do agree with most of Bowern and Warner's assertions. In this reply, Robinson…

Linguists tend to believe that total complexity of human languages is invariable. In order to test this hypothesis empirically, we need to calculate the complexity in different domains of language structure: phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. In this paper I provide some guidelines for documenting tonal systems and evaluating their complexity. I…

Prosody plays a vital role in communication, but is one of the most widely neglected topics in language documentation. This omission is doubly detrimental since intonation is unrecoverable from transcribed texts, the most prevalent data sources for many indigenous languages. One of the underlying reasons for the dearth of prosodic data is…