Field Linguistics: A Beginner's Guide Review

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Field Linguistics: A Beginner's Guide ReviewTerry Crowley was an Australian linguist who specialized in languages of the Pacific, especially those spoken in Vanuatu. Over his career he had done a great deal of fieldwork, and he distilled his experiences into FIELD LINGUISTICS: A Beginner's Guide. He had more or less completed the book before his untimely death in 2005, and Nick Thieberger saw it through the press.
FIELD LINGUISTICS covers the basics of ethics, how to find informants and solicit data, and how to organize one's material. The book has some strong points, notably Crowley's recommendations on ways to give back to the community. The local community should get some immediate benefit from a visiting linguist's work, such as children's primers. Crowley also cautions fieldworkers that they should be super-polite and respect local customs, so that data is easier to gather and future fieldworkers will be made welcome. There's more advice on how to deal with officialdom, often suspicious of researchers, than other introductions to the field.
However, Crowley writes in a folksy tone that tends to go on and on, and I came to think that FIELD LINGUISTICS could have been cut down to a mere 100 pages without being any less useful. Certainly the long opening section about why linguists should do fieldwork should have been cut. Most likely, any student picking up the book already knows about the value of fieldwork to linguistics (documenting hitherto unresearched languages, building a corpus, etc.), so there's no need to sell them on the idea of fieldwork, but rather just teach them how to do it.
This book should ideally have been a smaller pamphlet instead of a pricey book with a lot of unnecessary fluff. If you have access to this book at your institution, there's much to learn, but it's hard to recommend a purchase.Field Linguistics: A Beginner's Guide OverviewCrowley's voice of experience brings us the best practical fieldwork guide to date.Sensible, frank, and comprehensive, this book prepares beginning field workers for the rigours ahead and will save years of costly trial and error. N. J. EnfieldThis book is a comprehensive, practical guide to field linguistics. It deals in particular with the problems arising from the documentation of endangered languages. Deploying a mixture of methodology and practical advice and drawing on his own immense experience, Terry Crowley shows how to record, analyse, and describe a language in the field. He covers the challenges and problems the researcher is likely to encounter, offers guidance on issues ranging from ethics to everyday diplomacy, and provides full discussions of corpus elicitation, how to keep track of data, salvage fieldwork, dealing with unexpected circumstances, and many other central topics. "We all learn by our mistakes," he writes, "and I have plenty of my own to share with you."

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