From the field, to the Web, and back again: incorporating Internet methods into language ideology research

Abstract

Researchers from a variety of academic disciplines have begun to incorporate Web-based methodologies in their research agendas. Nonetheless, many of those interested in language ideologies – i.e. speakers’ beliefs about language, as well as their rationalisation of those beliefs – vehemently stand by site-specific ethnographic approaches. Rather than arguing for a replacement of one method by another, the present methodological analysis explores how Internet methods can be intertwined with more traditional, face-to-face techniques for data collection. Exemplifying this process by way of a three-phase project investigating Spanish-speaker opinions about various dialects of Spanish that exist in the world, we illustrate how online and offline methods can mutually inform one another, together allowing both specificity and generalisability of findings, as well as an overall more profound understanding of a given phenomenon of interest.