Source: “Monolingual Fieldwork” Demonstration - Daniel Everett (YouTube)

Summary from UWElingo blog post:

In this video, Dan Everett is doing a ‘monolingual fieldwork presentation’, something quite impressive: he works with a speaker of a language that he doesn’t know (and which was chosen in secret by others, so he couldn’t prepare for this). Dan is showing that without having a language in common, it is still possible to do Linguistic Fieldwork. In this case, Dan is speaking Pirahã, to ensure that the lady he is working with won’t get any additional clues through his language use.

This is a great example of how you can do monolingual fieldwork – in particular how to start monolingual fieldwork.

After the presentation, there are numerous questions from the audience (again: really helpful in showing how this works). Also, it is revealed that the language is [REDACTED]!

Posted originally on r/linguisticshumor

  • @CrulOPEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    There was a very similar comment in the reddit post, to which I replied:

    I also noticed that. I think it’s so the audience have something to know what’s happening. It could have been hidden from the volunteer. The only reason I can imagine for not doing so is that not seeing what he is writing might be less comfortable (especially if she were the only one in the room that cannot see it) and making it easy for “the subject” seems to be an important point.