languages and area spoken for chitipa - Centre for Language Studies

1.7 Problems/Limitations
As alluded to above, the field work was not without problems or limitations. The major
limiting factor was time. The study was carried out over a period of 30 days. The research
team worked very hard including Saturdays and Sundays to ensure that the project was
concluded in time. However, a few days into the exercise, it became apparent that the
time allocated to the exercise was not enough due to a number of problems that were
encountered and this had an effect on the study’s objectives, more especially getting
statistics on the number of speakers for the languages. This was not possible to achieve
because the research teams could not visit as many villages as it had planned for every T/
A.
A visit to Likoma Island, was cancelled because of the time factor. Fortunately, because
Likoma Island was under Nkhatabay district and just became a district recently, the teams
were able to get information on the languages spoken there from the Nkhatabay District
Commissioner’s office. It was however, not possible to get details on the geographical
distribution of the languages spoken on the island and the people’s views on the survey
questions .
During the pilot phase of the study, it was observed that Chitipa district, which shares
borders with Zambia and Tanzania, was the most linguistically complex district followed
by Karonga. It was decided, therefore, that Chitipa should be given more days than the
other districts where the language situation was somehow, simpler.
As pointed out above, it was noted during the survey that the 30 days allocated to field
work were not enough to conduct a thoroughly study of the region. A number of factors
contributed to this situation. These problems are outlined below
1.7.1 Distance between households
Most of the rural areas are sparsely populated and bushy and households are far apart. As
a result, researchers had to walk long distances from one household to another, let alone
from one village to another to administer the individual questionnaires. In some cases,
people were not found in their homes since they were busy working in their gardens as it
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