Trust Me, I am a Linguist! Building Partnership in the Field

Abstract

Although language documentation calls for linguists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and other scholars to work with each other, as well as with language communities, graduate students in linguistics often miss out on both parts of this enterprise: they have little opportunity to work on such teams and spend most of their fieldwork as “lone wolves.” In this paper, we reflect on our experiences as first-time fieldworkers and discuss how we managed to rid ourselves of the “lone wolf” label. We first discuss some of the challenges we faced in gaining the support of the communities we worked with. We then isolate the factors which facilitated our social integration and the benefits this had on our overall documentation projects.