What is Folk Linguistics?

Abstract

In Folk Linguistics (Mouton de Gruyter, 1999), Nancy Niedzielski and I hope to have shown that the beliefs about, reactions to, and comments on language by what we call "real people" (i.e., nonlinguists) are interesting, illuminating, and empowering from ethnographic, linguistic, and practical (or applied linguistic) points of view. I still believe so and am delighted to see in the literature and at many conferences that others apparently agree. So what's new? On a positive note, I believe that the final chapter of Folk Linguistics has pointed and continues to point the way to a great deal of as yet unexplored potential — the careful consideration of the underlying presuppositions and beliefs which lie behind the discourses and actions that constitute the primary data of folk linguistics. What are the folk theories of language held by real people, and how can we extract them from their discourses and actions? In Folk Linguistics several approaches to acquiring and interpreting relevant data were catalogued, but I am all too aware, as Niedzielski and I confess in the last chapter of that work, that much of what we did could be called "ostensive discourse analysis." We acquired the discourses of real people about language, transcribed them, held them up to the view of the reader, and said what we thought they meant and how they contrasted and/or converged with the belief(s) of "real linguists." Except for some of the operational tasks which we assigned respondents, that procedure was our general plan, and I am not unhappy with it. I think the data reported in Folk Linguistics is still the