EMU Linguistics Program

2006 Linguistic Society of America
Annual Meeting

Megan Zdrojkowski and Jessica Boynton

Challenges in endangered language fieldwork: A student perspective

Fieldwork on endangered languages is challenging even for seasoned linguists. For students, who are still in the process of learning about linguistics, fieldwork can be especially challenging. However, with proper preparation, it can also be especially rewarding, both for the student linguist and for the language community. We--a master's candidate and an undergraduate student--offer insights into how we dealt with the challenges we faced during our first field experience. We encourage frank and fruitful discussion between students interested in language documentation and experienced field linguists interested in training future language documenters.

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