Fieldwork in Alaska

[Tom Payne]

This request was sent by Andrej Kibrik, who is not a current Funknet
subscriber. Please respond directly to Andrej. Thanks! -- Tom Payne

From: Andrej Kibrik
To: Funknet
Re: Sociolinguistic Questionnaire

Dear Colleagues,

I am currently doing linguistic fieldwork on one of Athabaskan languages
of
Interior Alaska. I have an idea of making a sociolinguistic survey here,
in
addition to linguistic research as such. The language is in decline and
has
not been acquired by children for a few decades. The uniqueness of the
situation is that the language is spoken by less than one hundred
persons
(the number of speakers was probably never much higher than now), and
the
vast majority of speakers reside in one village. Therefore, one can
fairly
easily conduct not just a representative sociolinguistic survey, but
have a
nearly complete coverage of potential speakers.

The sorts of questions I have in mind include those on bilingualism,
degrees
of fluency, situations of language use, attitudes toward language
maintenance, and reasons for language obsolescence.

I am not sufficiently versed in this kind of research, and I am sure
that
the way you pose questions may dramatically affect your results. I would
be
very grateful if someone could give me some advice on the set of most
crucial question and their formulations, or perhaps send me samples of
similar questionnaires.

Please contact me directly at

ffaak at aurora.alaska.edu

Thanks a lot in advance,

Andrej A. Kibrik