Appendix A Research Methods

I conducted the research for this book between 2011 and 2023, with fieldwork in 2015–2016 and 2019. For events that took place before my fieldwork began, I observed streaming video footage of public hearings and government meetings. These government-sponsored events typically lasted one to three hours, featured a variety of speakers, and were posted online with additional attachments such as meeting agendas and minutes. Because contemporary language policy campaigns tend to be sources of controversy and matters of public record, they have a significant online presence. Each of the four governments typically deliberated over the course of three to four public hearings and meetings over several months, resulting in several dozen hours of public interaction. In addition to analyzing these materials in their own right, collecting this data also informed the rest of the study, by giving an early sense of which people and organizations were involved.

In cases where a key file was not available on a government’s or organization’s website, I sent a request over email or I used the Internet Archive to locate it on an older version of the website. The Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine (at http://archive.org) does not pinpoint when a website or a version of a site first appears online, but its automated web crawler has periodically collected and archived snapshots of public websites since 1996. So, this tool can be used both to find older versions of sites and to approximate when an older version was the current one.

During the fieldwork phase of data collection, I interviewed people, observed and attended events relating to local politics and culture, wrote field notes, took photographs, and collected texts. Field notes were instrumental as a way to document my impressions of the communities I visited, the events I attended, the people I interacted with, the discourse I encountered, and the research methods I used.

Interview recruitment focused on people directly involved in shaping, sponsoring, and/or protesting these language policies. Over the course of two rounds of Institutional Review Board-approved research, I interviewed twenty-six people, and I include twenty-three of those people in this book (Table A.1). About half of them are in favor of making English the official language, and the other half are against, although this designation is so blurry that I have chosen not to officially categorize each person’s stance. I define “activist” broadly, in order to include everything from speaking at public hearings, to participating in protests, to collecting signatures for a petition, to writing letters to the editor, to taking on more formal roles in organizations or commissions. Similarly, under the banner of “blogger,” I include both people who run their own blog on their own website and someone who runs a Facebook page. I would not characterize most Facebook accounts as blogs, but in this case, the page features frequent posts about current events that are several paragraphs long. The descriptions of each person’s role are not meant to be exhaustive but are merely aimed at giving a sense of the breadth of participants’ experiences. For example, most of the elected officials could also qualify as activists, and social media can be a form of activism (Zentz, Reference Zentz2021). To recruit these participants, I contacted all the elected officials involved, as well as people who spoke in depth at public hearings or who wrote prominent editorials or blog posts. To reach people who may have played more unassuming roles, I also distributed flyers and asked each interview participant if there were anyone else they recommended that I interview.

Interviews were 30–120 minutes long, semi-structured, and tailored to each person’s particular roles and experiences. For example, my questions for a libertarian activist in Queen Anne’s County were nearly all different from my questions for a Democratic politician in Anne Arundel County. However, there were certain common threads: I always asked how long someone had lived in their current county, how they would describe that county, how they first learned about their county’s language policy, what surprised them the most, if they ever changed their mind on some aspect of language policy, if there is anything they would do differently next time, and what advice they would offer to someone in their position. For each person, I would also ask several more text-based questions, either focused on policy texts from their county, policies from ProEnglish, or materials they themselves had published or discussed at a public hearing. Participants had a high degree of control over the nature, setting, recording, and identifiability of the interview (Olinger, Reference Olinger2020, pp. 195–199). Twenty-one people agreed to be recorded, and two opted for no recording. In cases where I did not record, I took notes, but did not attempt to quote more than brief phrases.

I also collected relevant news articles and social media posts. Because my focus is on policymakers and activists, rather than on the general public’s opinions or impressions per se, I used these sources sparingly. In other words, while there have been illuminating studies of language policy discourse in newspaper articles (Fitzsimmons-Doolan, Reference Fitzsimmons-Doolan2009; Tardy, Reference Tardy2009) and online comments sections (Marlow, Reference Marlow2015), that was not my aim. Rather, I generally focused on articles that were by or about my participants. However, there were also moments when I analyzed a text from news or social media in its own right. For example, I started to conceptualize Chapter 3 after reading a Frederick News-Post editorial (2012, February 26) about the English-only movement’s “conflicting messages,” and I first came across the Human Relations Commission’s Resolution on Facebook (Chapter 4). Finally, media discourse played a more important role in my analysis of people who played key roles in local language policy but who did not participate in interviews.

During this whole period of contemporary research, I was also visiting archives and consulting librarians. Archival research does not always go together with ethnographic research, but I find it indispensable for studying language policy movements that unfold over several decades and for studying discourse beyond the speech event more generally (Wortham and Reyes, Reference Wortham and Reyes2015; see also Inoue, Reference Inoue2006). Archival materials readily lend themselves to two of the key components of ethnography: foregrounding people’s perspectives on their own activities and triangulating multiple kinds of data.

Data analysis began with transcribing the audio/video interviews and footage of government meetings, with an eye toward transcribing not just people’s words but also nonverbal activities like laughter and gestures (in the case of video). Because I am interested in discourse across events, I also made a point of marking instances of reported speech when possible and, furthermore, of distinguishing between reported thought, reported talk, reported writing, and reading aloud from a text at hand. On a very practical level, it is important to note when someone is speaking off the cuff versus when they are reading a text aloud. While I have experience with doing very fine-grained transcription, for this book my priority was to make people’s speech as readable and accessible as possible, and so I have taken the liberty of adding punctuation and deleting some stops, starts, and “um”s.

Data analysis was a recursive process, as I continued to collect and compare data, take notes, follow up with participants, and revise my research questions (Sheridan, Reference Sheridan, Nickoson and Sheridan2012, p. 76). While this kind of iteration is typical of ethnographic writing research, the process was amplified by the fact that when the study began Frederick County’s English-only policy seemed thoroughly entrenched, and so I only came to focus on questions of resisting and rewriting (Chapter 4) as the repeal campaign began.

In order to check how my interpretations compared with those of my interview participants, I sent copies of earlier iterations of this project to relevant participants along the way, including for one final round of member checking in spring 2023. During the final check, I sent summaries of every chapter and copies of the specific paragraphs where I incorporated their interview, and people could respond over email or through comments on a GoogleDoc. I heard back from seven people across three counties. Four people had detailed feedback, which I was grateful to incorporate into the final manuscript.