5. Fieldwork

The most important prerequisite for fieldwork is adequate training. Many university departments of linguistics offer a field methods course. Collectors should be strongly encouraged to complete such a course. It will be useful, too, to have a fieldwork manual specifically designed for a particular region. ⁷ Although there are general works available⁸ a regional manual will address problems only to be found in that area and will be especially suitable for equipping those who have completed field methods courses or had fieldwork experience elsewhere. Fieldworkers should have a firm grounding in the major areas of linguistics with particular attention to phonetics, analytic techniques and historical/comparative linguistics. A first degree with a major in linguistics (or comparable training) will be essential while field experience will be a great advantage. Collectors with little or no field experience should be encouraged to work first on languages with a substantial number of speakers. Salvage linguistic projects with the last few speakers should be reserved for more experienced fieldworkers; not only because the work is much more difficult and can be very frustrating for the neophyte but also because an insensitive or inexperienced collector can antagonize the few remaining speakers and may spoil the situation altogether.

To ensure the most efficient use of staff, research co-ordination is essential. Depending on the size of the archive there could be a member of staff responsible for documenting past and ongoing research and regularly updating research priorities; otherwise the. researcher would have to investigate the intended project before going into the field (see also section 8).

When the data has been collected it can be of great assistance to have it arranged in standardised formats. Linguistic descriptions presented in a basically standard format can be found in Dixon and Blake's Handbook of Australian Languages. ⁹ The parallel treatments offer ease of comparison from language to language and assist in finding gaps and filling them. Vocabulary can also usefully be arranged in a standard format. The Wordlist for Australian Languages¹⁰ lists over two thousand lexical items arranged in semantic domains with a finding list. When this information has been compiled it would be a fairly simple matter to record a parallel aural version to be deposited in the tape archive. In this way a substantial portion of the lexical resources of a language would be available on audio tape arranged so that particular concepts could be pinpointed very quickly.

Any fieldwork project will be dependent to a large extent on the goodwill, co-operation and knowledge of local people in the field. It is to local expertise, particularly as regards native speaker knowledge, that we now turn our attention.

7. For an Australian example see Sutton, P. and Walsh, M. Revised Linguistic Fieldwork Manual or Australia; Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies; 1979
8. A good general guide is Samarin, W.J. Field Linguistics: A Guide to Linguistic Field Work; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston; 1967. An example of a heuristic guide to Linguistic analysis can be found in Thomas, D. Notes and Queries on Language Analysis (Language Data. Asian-Pacific Series No.l0); Huntingdon Beach, California: Summer Institute of Linguistics; 1975
9. Dixon, R.M. W. and Blake, B.J. (Eds.); Handbook of Australian Languages; Canberra: ANU Press and Amsterdam: Jo n Benjamins; 1979. Contributors to this series (a number of volumes are planned) are provided with guidelines on how to present their material.
10. Sutton, P. and Walsh, M. (compilers); AIAS Wordlist or Australian Languages; Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies; 1979