This guide emerges from a combined forty years of field research in over two dozen languages of the Brazilian and Bolivian Amazon, Greenland and Europe, including immigrant languages in Europe. The authors have been teaching field methods courses and seminars in Brazil, the USA, the UK, Germany and Denmark. They have had the enjoyable experience of taking graduate students and seasoned linguists from Brazil, the USA, Israel, Germany and the Netherlands to the field in order to train them in fieldwork methods. The authors thoroughly enjoy the intense challenge of field research and the presentation of the lessons learned thereby to the international linguistics community. Many of the suggestions included within this guide are ones we wish someone had made to us before we began our field research careers.

This book is intended for upper-division undergraduates, graduate students and above. It can be used in class or for self study. The book presumes basic knowledge of most areas of linguistics. To lighten up the reading and make it more personal, we have added anecdotes from our own and others’ experience. Depending on what you are setting out to do (or learn), some sections will be more relevant than others, though generally all chapters should be of interest to the field researcher.