Hør dog hvad de siger - Note-to-Self: Trials & Errors

The effect of Briggs’ points is that the world views that find their way into the final report, are
the ones that are formulated by speakers who share the interviewer’s linguistic frame of refe-
rence. This demands that in order for an informant to make his views heard, he must be able
to express himself in a format known to the interviewer; and not the other way around as
would be ideal – that the interviewer makes the necessary translation from one code to
another. When, however, Briggs familiarised himself with the native metacommunicative re-
pertoires, he found that the best informants were the ones that had previously given short,
evading answers. The morale is that an interviewer needs to know the ‘native’s’ metacommu-
nicative repertoires if he intends to interview him.
As a simple yet illustrative measure of the cultural differences, I give some quantitative
data deducted from my own research. These measures of linguistic difference between infor-
mants are based on 41 interviews, 23 with middleclass informants, 18 with working class in-
formants. The questionnaire used as fundament for the interviews is the same in all interviews.
Likewise, the interviewer is the same in all interviews.
Table 1: Quantitative measures of linguistic differences (means)
Word level Utterance level
Informants
Word
types
Word
tokens
Utterances Length of
utterances
Middle class 1214.4 9515.2 443.9 21.44
Working class 827.5 5749.8 349.1 16.47
ANOVA sig. p