Language Situations” (‘LangSit’) is a method to elicit, in a parallel way, language use across registers, languages, and speaker groups. In this design, participants are familiarised with a fictional event, and are asked to imagine being a witness to this event and describe it by acting out different communicative situations. This method yields systematically comparable, yet ecologically valid data that captures the breadth of linguistic resources within speakers’ repertoires, combining the advantages of controlled elicitations with those of spontaneous data collection. LangSit has already been used in a range of studies, for different languages and dialects, with monolingual and multilingual speakers, for majority, heritage, and foreign languages, in multilingually and monolingually oriented societies and across five continents.
In her talk, Heike Wiese describes the LangSit method, illustrate some findings, and discuss the research resources available for this method.
References
RUEG group (2018ff). Language Situations elicitations. https://osf.io/qhupg/
Wiese, Heike (2020). Language Situations: A method for capturing variation within speakers’ repertoires. In: Yoshiyuki Asahi (ed.), Methods in Dialectology XVI. Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang [Bamberg Studies in English Linguistics]. pp.105-117.
Wiese, Heike (2021). LangSit information portal.
https://www.linguistik.hu-berlin.de/de/institut/professuren/multilinguale-kontexte/LangSit/main
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