Reflections on linguistic fieldwork

In this reflections piece, I draw upon my experience as a fieldworker in Australia, a linguist who also works with archival materials spanning 150 years, and a linguist whose work includes both documentary and descriptive aspects. I center this piece around three questions about aspects of fieldwork that have changed since the publication of Himmelmann (1998). The first is what we collect—that is, have our field methods changed? The second question concerns the documentation we produce—is it different? Thirdly, are there features of Himmelmann’s manifesto which were the products of its time, and has academia changed? Arguably in all cases that there has been change for the better, but we still have some way to go, and that some of the original formulation of a dichotomy between documentation and description are counterproductive.National Foreign Language Resource Cente