Collecting data

Ethical and sustainability-related questions and issues in collecting linguistic data

There are several factors to be taken into consideration when collecting linguistic data, especially in the case of language documentation. Working with linguistic communities and publishing texts based on that can have an impact on the community and shape how the language or culture is viewed. In the worst case this can have unintended and unwanted consequences, and it is necessary to evaluate these consequences in advance as well as possible.

Language standardization

Collecting data about a language and for example creating reference grammars inevitably forces the linguist to prioritize certain forms of a language over others. It is impossible to describe a language with all of its variations due to limited capacity of what can be described and the way languages constantly change. Standardizing a language can therefore be an unintended consequence of linguistic research, and this material can then potentially be used for example in education.

While there are many advantages to standardizing languages (e.g., mutual comprehensibility, a common variant of language for education), there are also downsides that may have social consequences and should therefore be considered carefully. Standardized forms of language tend to be received as more elite way of speaking, whereas speakers of other forms might be seen as speaking an inferior variant. Standardizing may also cause parents to favour the standardized forms at the cost of their native forms and even culture, in hopes that their children will not suffer from speaking a low-status variant. Therefore the ethical consequences of linguistic field work should be considered carefully in advance.