Campus Linguistics—Back to the Roots of the Field
Monty Ed. Mond
Geomantic Institute for Sociolinguistics and Psychometrics, Fortuna Major University, Nazca, Peru
Most research in past decades on dialects, sociolects, idiolects, metalects, paralects, and the like, has unnecessarily stressed the necessity of going out there, into the so-called field, to often far-away, out-of-the-way places, and documenting how speakers purportedly really speak. But our colleagues who so bravely endured this paradigm, spending long hours on uncomfortable trains and eating, well, we don’t really want to know what exactly, have been misled, I argue, for a long time. For as the learnèd scholars that we ought to be, we need to go back to the roots of our discipline. This includes, of course, critically examining the field itself. And what do we find, as philologists, when applying fine philological tools such as etymological inquiry? We find that our ‘campus’, where we spend the best of our time, in fact is the field. No more travelling around to obscure places and risking our health for a handful of data! We may even be able to stay within the limit of the department’s budget.
As a practical application and example of this fundamental rethinking of what it means to do fieldwork, I took it upon me to go on a trip to see our colleagues in various places around the campus. The results may be examined below. The map should speak for itself.
