Linguistics and Oral History

This edited volume brings together linguistic and oral history practitioners to explore the synergies between both disciplines. Contributors from Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, the UK, and the United States each take a different perspective on the relationship between oral history and language. Though linguists have been using oral history texts for some time and oral historians have a long tradition of describing language, there has hitherto been an absence of a single volume that brings together practitioners from both fields to explore the intersection between both areas. This book is comprised of contributions from linguists (corpus linguists, sociolinguists, dialectologists and second language acquisition experts) to present how they investigate oral history texts from a linguistic perspective as well as contributions from oral history practitioners who tend to focus on language-related aspects of their subject. In presenting perspectives from both disciplines, this book implicitly exposes the reader to synergies that exist between oral history and linguistics including methodological parallels in constructing and analysing written transcriptions of spoken events, analytical approaches to determining salient themes and linguistic items, relevant theoretical perspectives that frame discourse practices in oral histories and the practical considerations which researchers face when investigating large sets of spoken data. In essence, this book shows that oral historians and linguists are often doing the same things in different ways and makes the case for more collaboration between the disciplines to promote exchange of ideas, efficiency of practice and reciprocal development.