de la Constitución de la OIT (documento GB.312/INS/7)

In ethnographic studies, there is often little distinction between participant observation and a formal interview. Any interviews tend to be unstructured in order to allow the participant to elaborate on their view of the world, and an interview can occur in opportunistic informal settings (O’ Reilly 2005, 115). While inspired by this approach, my research was subject to several practical constraints: firstly, the need to obtain large quantities of speech data in Gaelic from each individual, secondly, the need to obtain very high quality sound recordings for acoustic analysis, thirdly the need to obtain consistent demographic information from each participant. For this reason my interviews were conducted in a slightly more formal manner, though attempts were made to provide as ecologically valid a setting as possible.

Previous work in sociolinguistics has adopted the Sociolinguistic Interview, as defined by Labov (1984, 32-33) as the methodological tool of choice. I here used an interview technique aimed at collecting data for sociolinguistic analysis, but without adhering rigidly to the methodology advocated by Labov. The interviews were semi-structured as this provided the best possible balance between gaining specific information and allowing participants to elaborate on topics of interest.

Typically, the aim of collecting data for a sociolinguistic analysis aims to collect ‘the vernacular’ (Tagliamonte 2006, 8). ‘The vernacular’ refers to a baseline of an individual’s

speech which they would use in a relaxed informal setting, referred to by Sankoff & Thibault (1980, 54) as ‘everyday speech’, or as ‘real language in use’ (Milroy 1992, 66). Why it is so crucial to try and collect ‘the vernacular’ is explained by Labov (1984, 29): ‘the vernacular’

is the most systematic form of speech, where sociolinguistic differences are most apparent.

It is also a baseline context, and other speech styles are defined in relation to this baseline.

The first of these arguments could be viewed as a little circular: sociolinguistics finds that

‘the vernacular’ is the most systematic form, but this is only ascertained from analysis of speech that is labelled by the analyst as an example of ‘the vernacular’ and then examined.

The analyst only knows this speech is ‘vernacular’ because of the patterns within it. The second argument in favour of ‘the vernacular’ is that it is a baseline context, which assumes some kind of underlying speech system. Instead it is perhaps more fruitful to consider speech within each context without recourse to a notion of which context is the baseline.

A difficulty associated with using data from sociolinguistic interviews to infer patterns in ‘everyday speech’ is the necessity of recording participants. In other words, the aim of variationist sociolinguistics is to ascertain how people speak when they are not being recorded, but we must necessarily do this by recording speakers. Labov (1984, 30) refers to this situation as the ‘Observer’s paradox’: ‘Our aim to observe how people talk when they are not being observed [. . . ] We refer to it as a paradox since it can never fully be solved completely in principle’. While this difficulty can never fully be overcome, it can be mitigated by ensuring conditions which put participants at their ease, and allow them to express themselves without making radical alterations to the behaviour they exhibit outside of interview contexts. Several innovative methods have attempted to mitigate the effects of a recording context on speech. For example providing the participants with recording devices and allowing them to record their own data (Podesva 2007; Smith, Durham & Fortune 2007, 21; Podesva 2011; Sharma 2011), or allowing participants to talk to one another without the interviewer present (Stuart-Smith, Timmins & Tweedie 2007; Snell 2008, 2010). As will be fully explored in Chapter 5, many of the younger participants in this thesis only used Gaelic in certain formal contexts, and as will be demonstrated, did not use Gaelic for peer-group interaction. For these reasons I chose to conduct interviews in order to encourage them to speak Gaelic, and interviewed students individually as group interviews would have been ecologically invalid. The long period of time I had spent conducting ethnography and getting to know participants before recording helped to put participants at ease during the interview setting. Many of the participants I worked with were familiar with interview contexts, and had previously been interviewed by Gaelic researchers, or Gaelic TV and radio. This was especially prevalent among the young speakers, due to the high demand for young people’s comment on Gaelic TV and radio, but relatively small number of young people who speak Gaelic.

All participants were interviewed in Gaelic using a Labovian style sociolinguistic interview combined with an ethnographic semi-structured interview methodology. If participants had a lot to say about a particular topic, I asked follow-up questions to encourage them to elaborate.

Slightly different interview methods were used for each of the groups of speakers interviewed, so the methods are discussed separately here.

4.5.1 Older speakers in Lewis

The interviews among Lewis older speakers were conducted in a quiet room in the participant’s house and generally lasted around 40-45 minutes, with occasional interviews lasting 90 minutes. All participants were recorded in Audacity using a Beyerdynamic Opus 55 headset microphone, a Rolls Live mixer and a USB audio interface. The sound files were recorded to a laptop computer at 44,100Hz, 16 bit quantisation. The headset microphone was adapted slightly for some of the older participants who were deaf and would not easily be able to maintain conversation with an earpiece covering one ear. The headset was placed around the participant’s neck leaving the microphone around 4-5cm from the mouth. Participants commented that this was not an uncomfortable arrangement, and they had soon forgotten that the microphone was there. Indeed they commented that this setup was even preferable to having a table top or hand held microphone constantly in front of their face. In general the older speakers were unable to read Gaelic, so where this was the case I did not carry out a word-list task as with the young speakers. Where participants were able to read Gaelic, I asked them to read a word-list. Words were presented on my computer screen in an iPhoto presentation (similar to Powerpoint, but in a format which allowed me to randomise the order of the pictures with a script). Each word was presented three times in random order, and was written in large letters with an accompanying picture of the desired lexical item. The words were chosen to be of maximum familiarity to the participants, whilst containing some of the linguistic features I was interested in. With the participant, I then filled in a short demographic questionnaire about their place of birth, other places they had lived, parents’ and grandparents’

places of birth, and aspects of language use. The background questions asked are Section 4.5.5, and the results are reported in Section 5.3 and in Appendix B.

Due to the Gaelic-centric nature of my research, I did not conduct any of the interview in English, contrasting with interviews among the young people (see below). The older speakers recruited were willing to take part in sharing their knowledge of Gaelic, and then asking them to speak English could have been insulting and inappropriate, as well as challenging for some speakers.

I realised after conducting a few interviews that in traditional Lewis households visiting friends, neighbours or relatives follows an almost ritualistic schedule. Participants incor-porated my visit as a researcher into this formalised framework of visiting. Often I would be greeted at the door by a member of the participant’s family who would direct me to the parlour where the participant was waiting for me. The interviews most often took place in the formal parlour rather than ‘backstage’ in the kitchen (Goffman 1990). Tea or coffee was always provided as well as large amounts of cake and biscuits. As well as being willing to answer my questions, the participants were very eager to know about my own background,

and interviews were more a sharing of information than me gathering information, especially when I knew the participant well. The majority of my interviews with older people in Lewis were conducted in this manner, as were visits when I was not recording. Only when I began to know families well and could drop in unannounced did the visit move to the kitchen.

4.5.2 Younger speakers in Lewis

Among young people in Lewis I worked with each participant for one lesson, fifty-five minutes. The interview itself was conducted first, and typically lasted 30-45 minutes. As with the older speakers, I also asked the younger participants about their place of birth, parents’

and grandparents’ places of birth, and home language use. Among the younger speakers, I took this opportunity to ask questions in English and discuss answers in English in order to elicit some additional data in English. Finally the students were asked to read the English reading passage ‘The boy who cried wolf’ to provide some read data on their English. This reading passage was chosen as more representative of all the sounds in English than the more commonly used ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ (Deterding 2006), as well as more relevant to young people. The passage is in Appendix C.

The headset microphone proved invaluable for recording in a school situation. As a guest in the school I was given little say in the room I was allocated for recording the students, and although the room was quiet and empty, the noises of the surrounding school environment were anything but quiet. I had to contend with bells, students outside in the yard, doors banging, and other such noises. Since the microphone was very close to the participant’s mouth I could turn the gain down so the surrounding noise was practically inaudible on the recordings. The students were completely familiar with using headsets so were quite comfortable with the recording setup. Instead of using the headset provided with the microphone, I adapted an Xbox headset and taped the microphone to it. This headset was easier to put on and more comfortable than that provided with the microphone. Many of the students actually used exactly the same headset for hours at a time on a daily basis to play computer games at home.

Other participants were enthusiastic about using a headset like ones they had seen in television programmes about call centres, or in fast food drive throughs.

4.5.3 Teachers in Glasgow

As discussed above, I did not conduct interviews with the teachers in either school, though some teachers in Glasgow provided word-list data using the methodology described in Section 4.5.1.

4.5.4 Younger speakers in Glasgow

The interview setup and methodology was the same as for the students in Lewis, though the interviews lasted slightly shorter as classes at the Glasgow school lasted 50 minutes instead

of 55.

4.5.5 Biographical and language use questionnaire

The biographical and language use questions asked of each participant are listed below:

1. Name

2. Date of Birth 3. Current postcode 4. Where were you born?

5. Where were you raised?

6. Have you lived anywhere else? (If yes please detail) 7. Where is your mother from?

8. Where is your father from?

9. Where are your grandparents (mothers parents) from?

10. Where are your grandparents (fathers parents) from?

11. What language(s) do you speak to your mother?

12. What language(s) do you speak to your father?

13. What language(s) do you speak to your siblings?

14. What language(s) do / did you speak to your grandparents?

15. What language(s) does your mother speak to you?

16. What language(s) does your father speak to you?

17. What language(s) do your siblings speak to you?

18. What language(s) do / did your grandparents speak to you?

19. Do you attend a Gaelic-speaking social, leisure or religious group? If yes, how often?

20. What language(s) do you dream in?

21. What language(s) do you watch TV in?

22. What language(s) do you listen to the radio in?

23. In what language do you read books?

24. In what contexts do you generally use Gaelic? E.g. specific places, specific people, specific occasions

25. In what contexts do you generally use English? E.g. specific places, specific people, specific occasions

26. Any other comments on your language use?