LL-L "Code switching" 2005.02.15 (06) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 15.FEB.2005 (06) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: R. F. Hahn <lowlands-l at lowlands-l.net>
Subject: Code switching


Dear Lowlanders,

I've been listening to various field research interview recordings whose
purpose is to gather data from moribund languages. Most of these involve
American and Siberian languages, but I hope that my observations are
relevant to such activities involving Lowlands varieties as well.

It appears that the greatest interference in interviews of this type is that
of the interviewee wanting to accommodate the interviewer, especially where
the two share another language. I can see this as leading to distortions and
to deficient data sets.

Typically and usually justifiably, the interviewee considers the
interviewer's cultural and linguistic knowledge to be deficient and wants to
adjust or compensate for it. Even in my own limited experience, I have
noticed that interviewees often "scale down" their lexical inventory, based
on the assumption that the interviewer is unfamiliar with "difficult" words
and concepts. As a result, important lexical information is missed.

Persistent native speaker adjustment to outsiders can apparently even result
in the loss of lexicon among the native speakers' language variety itself.
For instance, when I use Low Saxon words like _kars(beer)_ 'cherry' and
_peyrsch_ (<Peersch>) 'peach', speakers of the Lower Elbe dialects of Olland
(Altes Land) and Veerlannen (Vierlanden) don't understand; they—being in or
from fruit-growing areas selling their produce to Hamburg—have adopted the
German terms _Kirsche_ and _Pfirsich_ instead and apparently are no longer
aware that those are loanwords (although the _Pf-_ ought to sent up a red
flag).

Code switching is a problem in interviewing. This involves switching back
and forth between two or more languages. I have noticed (also in my own
behavior) that this tends to be set off either by the use of a loanword or a
loaned phrase or by the interviewer switching code. I found some glaring
examples of this the other day while listening to some interviews with
speakers of Ainu (Aynu)
<http://www3.aa.tufs.ac.jp/~mmine/kiki_gen/murasaki/>, a moribund indigenous
language of Northern Japan and of the Kuril Islands (some of which are
territorially disputed between Japan and Russia), and now somewhere between
moribund and extinct in Southern Sakhalin and at the southernmost tip of
Kamchatka, Siberia. This particular set of interviews involves one of the
very last, now deceased speakers of Sakhalin Aynu, a speaker who had
migrated to Japan. Although the interviewer seems to try to suppress it, she
tends to interject Japanese phrases, such as そのhecire hawehehcinは何だったの？
_Sono "hecire hawehehcin" wa nandatta no?_ 'What was it, that "hecire
hawehehcin"?' or 'acahcipo? それどういうこと? _'acahcipo? Sore wa dou iu koto?_
'"'acahcipo"? What's that?' Sometimes this triggers a code switch in the
informant's speech, and the interviewer must steer her back to Ainu, and she
even then occasionally uses Japanese words, such as in それ, 'aynu 'itah 'ani
yee kanne. _Sore (J), 'aynu 'itah 'ani yee kanne_ Say that (J) in Ainu'.

I am not suggesting that the named recordings are not extremely valuable as
they are. I just used them as an example of something I have observed many
times in language gathering interviews conducted in several parts of the
world.  It seems to me that interviewers should be taught to avoid code
switching (even if they don't understand something right away) in order to
avoid losing data.

I wonder what others think about this.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

P.S.: Talking about Ainu, thanks to a newly joined Lowlander, we might soon
have an Ainu translation of "The Wren" complete with a sound recording!

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