Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

J. MARSHALL
8) I never eat brose or any traditional meals. I prefer modern/international dishes.
9) A good education, getting on in life, and having all the modern equipment and
appliances is more important than quietness and having a good family life.
10) I’d rather spend a day in Aberdeen playing computer games and shopping than spend it
walking up Bennachie with friends and family.
This category of the questionnaire has proved consistently useful as a
predictor of language use. The reader will recall that Pedersen found that those
speakers who have rurally dominated composite life modes generally have
higher dialect scores than other informants with the same network scores.
Although Pedersen’s analysis was impressionistic, it prompted the author to
design the Doric experiment in such a way that an index score could be
arrived at for each individual involved.
6.9. Methodology and Data Collection
The data was collected in much the same way as in the pilot study, with the
only changes being to the design of the word-list and personal profile
questionnaire. The interviews were conducted informally, but as uniformly as
possible. Time was allocated to non-linguistic, as well as linguistic tasks, in an
attempt to allow interview speech as well as less formal speech. In Kerswill’s
(1994) Bergen study, interview speech was chosen, as it was felt that the data
would be as far as possible identical for each speaker, and more easily
compared 7 . As comparisons are to be made between individuals and between
groups, the speech samples should be comparable, so the Doric interviews
were designed structurally.
In the 1960s sociolinguistics was born to break with the dialectological
tradition of excluding the social aspects of variation (McMahon 1994: 233).
We now know that it is essential not to select informants in a subjective way,
since the experimenter’s own prejudices could have an unwelcome influence
on the results (loc. cit.). The informants in the Doric study were, for this very
reason, not selected by the author 8 . McMahon writes that, once the speakers
have been randomly selected, the problem of overcoming the ‘Observer’s
7 Informal secondary recordings were, however, made for some informants.
8 See below, under 6.13.
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