Who’s using who? The fieldworker as documenter and tool of language revalorization

The social positioning of fieldworkers affects the linguistic practices of the people with whom they interact, along with the grammatical structure of speech produced in their presence or for their recording equipment. Before arriving at my fieldwork site, I had carefully designed strategies for locating myself within certain social networks such that speakers would produce the code-switched styles central to my planned investigation. Unfortunately, these strategies failed. An examination of five newspaper and magazine articles profiling my research gives insight into local perceptions of my social role and ideological affiliations, and their effect on the linguistic styles available for structural analysis.