Away with linguists! Normativity, inequality and metascientific reflexivity in sociolinguistic fieldwork

This paper addresses the fact that in spite of the descriptive and well-intentioned ambitions of much sociolinguistic-ethnographic research, members of studied groups often continue to interpret such research as a largely vertically organized socio-political activity that communicates a prescriptive social and linguistic normativity the researcher is inevitably taken to embody. We argue that while many researchers agree that sociolinguistic fieldwork is inherently political, actual descriptions of informants' awareness of this are still rather scarce. In the process, we demonstrate how members... Mehr ...