Ministry of higher and secondary special education faculty of foreign languages of bukhara state university department of english literature

CHAPTER II: DIALECTOLOGY

2.1. Defining the domains of variability

Data are collected from informants on the basis of a questionnaire which determines the domains of variability and can either be direct or indirect. With the direct method, the informant is asked straightforward questions for which she has to produce an adequate solution in her dialect. The indirect method tries to elicit the linguistic solution required by somehow creating a situation in which the informant is supposed to produce it. Although indirect questioning has the disadvantage of being more time- consuming it is preferred in most dialectological studies. In addition, questionnaires vary with regard to the amount of leeway they allow to the fieldworker collecting the data. In a formal questionnaire, even if it is an indirect one, the form of the question is fixed. In an informal questionnaire, the fieldworker can ask his question in whatever form he chooses as long as it yields the desired results (for a good summary, cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 21–25).

The main sources from which data are collected are informants. The criteria for selecting them are subject to considerable variation, although the prototypical informant in the majority of studies on dialect geography tends to be a nonmobile, older and rural male (Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 29).

Of course, such a selection is directly motivated by the desire to get at the authentic local dialect variety. However, given the evidence of how strongly variation depends on social factors such as age, social class, education and gender, an adequate integration of these factors by interviewing more representative sets of a population appears to be more and more inevitable. Studies concentrating on the above prototype are not very likely to cover the whole range of linguistic variety within a geographical location unless its population is very stable and conservative. Phenomena such as migration and industrialization simply call for paying due attention to the above social factors.