Volume 8, Issue s3 - Special Issue: COVID-era sociolinguistics; Editor: Betsy Sneller

In the 18 months that have passed since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, linguists around the world have had to grapple with the practical and ethical issues that arose from trying to collect data in a safe and remote way while participants are experiencing an acute disaster. The current collection presents insights from a number of sociolinguistic research projects that were either initiated in response to the pandemic or that adjusted their research methods mid-trajectory. A concluding discussion article underscores that the honest reflections and concrete suggestions in this collection will remain relevant beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. They will be of value to any (socio)linguist who is navigating the ethics of fieldwork in uncertain or traumatic contexts, who is recruiting and retaining participants via remote means, or who is figuring out how to rapidly change their data collection methods.

The Michigan Diaries (MI Diaries) project was developed from late March to early April of 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. MI Diaries is a longitudinal sociolinguistic project, collecting “audio diaries” from participants throughout the pandemic and beyond. As a research project designed to obtain personal narratives from a time of deep anxiety and pain, and during a time where face-to-face data collection was not feasible, MI Diaries was confronted from the outset with a substantial set of both ethical and practical considerations. In this paper, we describe some of these challenges, and our false starts and eventual solutions in response. Throughout, we highlight decisions and methods that may be applicable for future researchers conducting remote fieldwork, navigating a speech community during a disaster, or both.

The Lothian Diary Project is an interdisciplinary effort to collect self-recorded audio or video diaries of people’s experiences of COVID-19 in and around Edinburgh, Scotland. In this paper we describe how the project emerged from a desire to support community members. The diaries have been disseminated through public events, a website, an oral history project, and engagement with policymakers. The data collection method encouraged the participation of people with disabilities, racialized individuals, immigrants, and low-proficiency English/Scots speakers, all of whom are more likely to be negatively affected by COVID-19. This is of interest to sociolinguists, given that these groups have been under-represented in previous studies of linguistic variation in Edinburgh. We detail our programme of partnering with local charities to help ensure that digitally disadvantaged groups and their caregivers are represented. Accompanying survey and demographic data means that this self-recorded speech can be used to complement existing Edinburgh speech corpora. Additional sociolinguistic goals include a narrative analysis and a stylistic analysis, to characterize how different people engage creatively with the act of creating a COVID-19 diary, especially as compared to vlogs and other video diaries.

Around the world, COVID-19 lockdowns have caused abrupt shifts in the amount of time spent at home versus out of the home for work, school, and recreation. As a result, many individuals have experienced a disruption in the frequency and type of their interactions. Given the importance of intergenerational transmission and intergenerational interaction for promoting language maintenance, and the importance of peer-to-peer interaction for promoting language shift, we ask how these abrupt changes necessitated by social distancing will affect language use and attitudes, specifically short- and long-term language maintenance or shift involving heritage languages. We examine principles of language maintenance and shift in the context of the COVID-19 lockdown for university students, people still involved in critical acts of identity creation. Here we describe a survey designed to learn how the lockdown is affecting young people’s language ecologies and attitudes. Using both quantitative and qualitative interpretive methods, we document the experiences of over 400 students, focusing on changes in their perceptions of their language use and the causes of these changes.

The Eastern Massachusetts Life and Language project was in its planning stages when the COVID-19 pandemic began to make headway in the United States in 2020. We contribute to the conversation about conducting linguistic fieldwork during a major social upheaval by providing a description of our shift to virtual methodologies, which include utilizing Instagram for participant recruitment and Zoom for conducting sociolinguistic interviews. Virtual data collection remains underexplored, as there has never been a widespread need for such practices until the recent lockdowns resulting from the pandemic. Likewise, social media appears to be underutilized as a recruitment tool in linguistic fieldwork. Nevertheless, it is effective in producing a heterogeneous participant sample in a short amount of time. We are delighted to engage in discussions about the effects of virtual recruitment and data collection on linguistic fieldwork and the data itself. We offer a description of our pivots to virtual recruitment and interviewing and the racial justice initiatives that become achievable because of these changes. We hope this contribution is beneficial to researchers looking to incorporate virtual methodologies into their research program.

The COVID-19 pandemic has substantially altered the fabric of life around the globe, raising crucial questions about the nature of language usage in person and online. But as researchers embark on new studies (or continuations of pre-COVID research), just as essential are considerations of what our responsibilities as researchers are to our participants now. In this article, we share our reflections upon the experience of conducting research in two different post-disaster contexts: after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, and after the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand. We describe the issues faced by researchers and participants alike in these locales and we recount the decisions that we made, as many of the same decision processes are being faced by researchers currently navigating data collection due to COVID-19 and its aftermath. These decisions are of course contextually dependent, though our examples draw from two very different situations, comparing and contrasting how various forces, timelines, and regionally specific issues may come into play for researchers in a context of upheaval. In this “long view” essay, we provide a retrospective account of practical tips and ethical considerations for researchers embarking on a similar track.