5.2 Selecting informants

Deciding which informants to interview is essential to research. As previously stated, it is possible to categorize informants according to a number of classifications, with the type of project largely determining the selection of participants. Depending on whatever type of data a fieldworker may be interested in, his/her informants may differ in age, social status or ethnic origin etc. For example, if one wants to observe a traditional dialect of a given language his interviewees are likely to have received little education, to be advanced in age, non-mobile and from isolated rural areas as their language usage can be assumed to have preserved features of the language used during their childhood (cf. Milroy and Gordon 2001: 16-18; Vaux 1999: 8, 150). However, a problem in connection with interviewing older people, especially in ethnographic fieldwork, is that they are often difficult to understand. They also tend to use archaic forms which may lead to an under-representation of new forms and loan-words in the data. In addition, they tire more quickly and often do not understand paradigmatic elicitation. For example, if asked to give the third person singular, they may give the first person instead (cf. Crowley 2007: 90-91). On the other hand, younger speakers are more likely to use current language which is said to be highly representative of the vernacular (cf. Milroy 1987b: 27). The fieldworker might also consider interviewing informants within his/her own age-group and with whom he/she can more easily connect on an emotional level. This will have the advantage that, aside from being able to cultivate social contacts, one can gain more insight into the community and access to valuable data.

A further factor that may play a role in the participant selection is a person's gender, as in some societies it is considered highly inappropriate for men and women to work with one-another.

An additional aspect which needs to be taken into consideration is which language to use during the interview. If the fieldworker and the informant both speak the same language, the matter resolves itself. If, however, the former intends to study a foreign language, which he/she has not yet mastered, the participants will inevitably need to communicate in the lingua franca, which presupposes a certain degree of elementary language proficiency on both the interviewer's and the interviewee's part.

The informant's education as well as his/her writing ability may also be of interest as having learned certain 'grammatically correct' forms in school, he/she may consider it appropriate to reproduce them in an interview, whereas in a more natural setting he/she would refrain from doing so. The fieldworker, however, is interested in observing one's natural speech-style. Pronouncing a word nearer to the orthography than usual is also an unwanted effect, although it might be of help that an informant can write as he or she can help with spelling and transcribing. And, of course, personal matters play a role as not everyone can work with everyone (cf. Vaux 1999: 7-9; Bowern 2008: 130-134; Crowley 2007: 89).

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