Introduction

Doing successful fieldwork is perhaps the most underestimated academic skill of all. For some reason or other, being out in the field to collect data is often regarded as some time off from ‘serious research’ in the lab or office, as a part of research that is certainly important yet not really central. When one enquires why recording conversations with people for a sociolinguistic project should be an easy task, the response one usually hears is that, after all, fieldwork ‘only’ involves having ‘a chat’ with somebody, which most of us do in our daily routines anyway (so what’s special about it?). Some have gone as far as to claim that fieldwork is not really work at all. Labov (1997) famously recalls that ‘I remember one time a fourteen-year-old in Albuquerque said to me, “Let me get this straight. Your job is going anywhere in the world, talking to anybody about anything you want?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “I want that job!”’.