Ethnography

Question 1

Ethnography

Answer 1

ethnography is an exploratory methodology. Rather than testing against predetermined categories, like many first wave sociolinguistic studies did, ethnography is a search for local categories. Where in survey fieldwork a researcher tried to fill a sample, ethnographic fieldwork finds out what is worth sampling. It is a process of mutual sense making among all participants in the ethnography

Question 2

Ethnography requires:

Answer 2

A close familiarity with the community being studied, through participant observation, ethnographic interviews, sustained periods of observation
An attention to community member’s own views of the community’s social structure, of their own place in the structure and of their community’s place in the wider world

Question 3

Style

Answer 3

Style
A performance of persona
Involves the active construction of a persona through the use of a range of dialectal/linguistic resources

Question 4

Three Waves of Sociolinguistics

Answer 4

1st, 2nd, 3rd

Question 5

1st Wave

Answer 5

1st Wave
Uses top down demographic categories to fill samples
Collects data and correlates the variants found with social categories
Does not look for meaning embedded in variation

Study example:
Labov’s study of New York department stores
Interested r-fulness/r-lessness and voiceless interdental fricative
Asked personnel and people in store informal questions and clarifications for requests

Question 6

2nd Wave

Answer 6

Focuses on speaker agency
Characterized by ethnographic field research and the exploration of local categories
This is a bottom up approach in letting the categories emerge and discussing variation in relation to those relevant categories
These studies view the meanings of variants as identity markers related directly to the groups that most use them.

Study example:
Eckert’s study of the jocks and burnouts of Belten High

Question 7

3rd Wave

Answer 7

Interested in how linguistic practices are the means through which speakers position themselves as social beings
Focuses on speaker agency
Gets even more at the meaning of social variation, meaning found both directly in interaction and in regards to how particular forms of variation are viewed and repeatable on a broader scale

Study example:
Anderson’s paper on appalachian migrants and the stances they deployed in ethnographic interviews
Analyzed how authoritative, evaluative, and interactional stances reflected community values, identity, and relational histories