From the field, to the Web, and back again: incorporating Internet methods into language ideology research

Abstract

Researchers from a variety of academic disciplines have begun to incorporate Web-based methodologies in their research agendas. Nonetheless, many of those interested in language ideologies – i.e. speakers’ beliefs about language, as well as their rationalisation of those beliefs – vehemently stand by site-specific ethnographic approaches. Rather than arguing for a replacement of one method by another, the present methodological analysis explores how Internet methods can be intertwined with more traditional, face-to-face techniques for data collection. Exemplifying this process by way of a three-phase project investigating Spanish-speaker opinions about various dialects of Spanish that exist in the world, we illustrate how online and offline methods can mutually inform one another, together allowing both specificity and generalisability of findings, as well as an overall more profound understanding of a given phenomenon of interest.

Keywords:

• methodology
• ethnography
• surveys
• interviews
• language ideologies/attitudes
• dialectology
• Spanish

Acknowledgements

My conceptualisation of Internet methodologies was shaped, in great part, by conversations with Ian Romain. My thanks to the members of the Centro de Estudios del Español de Estados Unidos (CEEEUS) in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at UCLA, especially its director, Claudia Parodi, for feedback on previous versions of this work. Results from the methods discussed here were presented at the annual meetings of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO, 2011), the American Anthropological Association (AAA, 2011), and the Linguistic Society of America (LSA, 2013). I thank the audiences for their feedback. Any remaining shortcomings are, of course, my own.

Notes

1. Transcript conventions follow those of conversation analysis, as described in Jefferson (2004).

2. Survey responses are reproduced here exactly as they were submitted by the respondent (i.e. with any typographical errors), with the exception of bolding for highlighting purposes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chase Wesley Raymond

Chase Wesley Raymond, PhD, is a teaching fellow in the Departments of Linguistics and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include the intersection of language with identity and society, particularly in situations of culture contact. Recent publications include articles in Research on Language & Social Interaction, Language in Society, and the Journal of Sociolinguistics.