A fish tale about “fieldwork,” or toward multilingual interviewing in applied linguistics

Abstract Focused as we are on uncovering how language works, many linguists are less cognizant of how the communicative strategies we employ in our knowledge-gathering activities impact the language users, identities, and communities we connect with and learn from. This autoethnographic essay, offered as a critical, introspective and analytical account by a U.S.-based, African American woman researcher, unfolds across three scenes of embedded ethnographic research in Micronesia and Tanzania—ocean-facing nations separated by a distance of more than 12,000 kilometers. Each scene's storytelling and dialogue—among users of Pohnpeian and Nukuoro in Micronesia, and users of Korean and Swahili in Tanzania—depicts how competing ideas about the value of marginalized languages surface within the talk of the research interview through allusions to socioracial power and linguistic capital. The essay concludes with a discussion of how a shift toward multilingual, multi-person interviewing can expand and deepen the insights of language-focused research.