This chapter is about the people involved in fieldwork. You may think that these are the speakers and the linguist. They are indeed the main participants, to be discussed in detail in 4.1 and 4.2. Yet, there are other stakeholders to consider. For example, the (entire) language community, people associated with the language community – or area – in question, as well as third parties interested in your data or in the results of your study. When planning your fieldwork, it may be a good idea to consider which people could have an interest in your work, or what effect your work could have on the people involved. We will discuss these issues in section 4.3. Section 4.4 will be concerned with fieldwork ethics.

The speakers

One of the first tasks is to find speakers to work with. Not all speakers are equally suitable for fieldwork. While some speakers have intuitive linguistic knowledge, showing a great interest in your work, others find linguistic work challenging. At the same time, the latter may be great story tellers! Yet others have speech impediments such as missing front teeth, which can make it difficult to work on phonological issues. In general, working with a variety of speakers is usually a good idea, as different people are good at different things. Of course, the types of speakers you choose to work with greatly depend on the goals of your fieldwork project.