Field Notes

Field Notes is a podcast about linguistic fieldwork, hosted and produced by Martha Tsutsui Billins. Its episodes are conversations with researchers who document and describe languages, and the guest list runs from South America to the Himalayas to Papua New Guinea. Guest episodes tend to open the same way, with the host reading out the guest's research background before the talk turns to the work itself. That work comes through in concrete terms. Kate Lindsey, a professor of linguistics at Boston University, discusses fieldwork on Ende in Papua New Guinea. One of the first tasks she describes is setting up a writing system, and it carries real weight there: schools mostly teach in English, but a community whose language has a writing system can run its first years of elementary education in that language instead. Communities in the area, she notes, ask linguists for exactly this kind of help. Karolina Grzech brings a different problem. Her work on Quechuan languages centers on evidentiality, the way grammar encodes how a speaker knows something, along with epistemic modality. Simple cases, like hearing rain on the roof versus being told it is raining, yield a neat paradigm; natural discourse, she explains, makes it messy, and that mess is what fascinates her. With Alexandra Philbin, originally from Dublin and now living in Valencia, the subject is urban speakers of minoritized languages, Irish in Dublin and Valencian Catalan in Valencia. The conversation reaches housing, as people leave Gaeltacht communities when they cannot afford a home or get permission to build one, and talk of an Irish-language settlement in Dublin where children could play on the street in Irish. Funding and government measures come up as the main obstacle. Yulha Lhawa grew up as a yak herder in Sichuan, became interested in linguistics in high school, and created a trilingual book, 'Warming Your Hands with Moonlight', to preserve local history and folklore. She recalls learning from elders how her village got its name, through a legend involving a Tibetan warrior and a great millstone for sharpening swords, a stone destroyed during road construction in the early 1990s. Episode 25 features Shobhana Chelliah, a documentary linguist focused on Tibeto-Burman languages of Manipur, India, and co-author of The Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork. The host admits to nerves beforehand and afterward calls her the nicest, kindest person. The fiftieth episode is the finale. In it, Martha and her sister Laura Tsutsui, who helps produce the show, turn to Amami sociolinguistic research. They talk about how hard it is to practice Amami away from the field, with no Duolingo to fall back on, and about an upcoming National Science Foundation fellowship project on social dynamics, hierarchy, grammar and language use in Amami. Across all of it, fieldwork comes across as something done with people: schools, families, elders, and the communities where these languages are spoken.