Volume: 27  Number: 1  Page: 61–78

Sociolinguistic Minorities, Research, and Social Relationships

Mark Garner1, Christine Raschka2 and Peter Sercombe2 1School of Language and Literature, University of Aberdeen, Old Aberdeen, Scotland and 2School of Arts and Social Sciences-ELC, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

This paper suggests elements of an agenda for future sociolinguistics among minority groups, by seeing it as a mutual relationship that involves benefits to researcher and researched. We focus on two aspects of the relationship. One is the political, economic and social benefits that can accrue to a minority group as a result of the research. Research planned and conducted along with the minority group can result in knowledge and other outcomes that are of direct benefit to the group, and can help to ensure that short-term advantages are not gained at the cost of long-term problems. The other is the role of ethical commitment in the research itself. Universities and other bodies have designed ethical procedures that can be used as more than restrictions or an administrative hurdle. They can, in fact, operate as a blueprint for good-quality research. We argue that as sociolinguists we must engage, through commitment to the people we study, with the moral and ethical issues, which are inseparable from the study itself. Such engagement results in more profound scholarship, since as they are expressed by and within the community’s discourse, the resulting descriptions will exemplify more closely the issues we are trying to describe.

Keywords: anthropology, empowerment, Fiske's four relational models, minority communities, research ethics, sociolinguistics

© 2006 M. Garner et al.

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