What is it about?
Speakers of endangered languages are a valuable source of data and living testimony to the progressive decline of the grammatical and lexical features of the language they speak. When they are aware of their role, for example because they are the focus of attention by field researchers, they may tend to exaggerate the features they consider typical of their declining language. The history of two informants from two Mediterranean islands, Krk and Capraia, who lived in the nineteenth century and could still speak their local Romance varieties, is a fascinating example of this tendency and provides us with some methodological and theoretical clues.
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Why is it important?
By telling this story, we show that field researchers need to be careful when collecting data, and that the reliability of linguistic data can vary from situation to situation, and even from one structural level to another within the same speaker.
Perspectives
The first aim of this paper was to underline the fact that linguistic fieldwork is first and foremost a dialogue between two people, in which the behavioural components are as important as the data collected. In addition, this paper has given me the opportunity to reconsider the history of the stressed vowel system of Vegliote, which I have enjoyed very much.
Lorenzo Filipponio
Universita degli Studi di Genova
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘Restsprecher’ and Hypercharacterizing Informants between Veglia and Capraia, September 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004694637_012.
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