ABSTRACT
Background e consideration of ethics as an essential part of the research plan in linguistics has gained an unusual, though not unwarranted, amount of attention in the past 20 years. Aware of the increasing diculty involved in explaining linguistic research to ethics boards, and building on postmodern anthropological discussions that encourage reexivity in the research process and an understanding of the eect that the researcher has in her representation of others (Kroskrity & Field, 2009), the Linguistic Society of America vetted and produced (2006-2009) an ocial statement concerning research ethics and created a permanent committee on Ethics in Linguistics (Linguistic Society of America, 2009). ough begun 35 years subsequent to its sister eld’s code, the LSA Ethics Statement draws broadly on the 1998 Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association (revised from 1971 and 1986) and also on the 1988 Statement of Ethics of the American Folklore Society. Like these codes, the LSA Ethics Statement broadly emphasizes the obligations of members of the linguistics profession to various groups and principles (which I have numbered here to match the LSA Statement): (6) to the public, in terms of accessibility and social and political implications of research; (5) to professional standards of honesty in scholarship;
(4) to students and colleagues, in terms of respect and attributing their contributions to scholarship; (3) to the needs and desires of language communities, especially where the community has an investment in language research; and (2) to the protection of individual research participants. Although the preface to the statement acknowledges its breadth and that it may conict with other statements, and part 1 acknowledges that every eld situation is dierent, it does not acknowledge that the general recommendations and responsibilities to research communities and the profession within the statement may conict with each other in the reality of actual research. Assuming that the linguist has obtained research rights as an autonomous agent, each of the areas above delineates specic obligations incurred in the research enterprise to the protection of the rights of human subjects and a responsibility for fairness and accuracy when dealing with the profession and its members. Item 3 above proposes additional responsibilities to linguistic communities. Such obligations, according to Garner, Raschka, and Sercombe (2006), “highlight the tension between public ethics concerning major social issues, such as the legal rights of minorities, and individual ethics, which relate to issues of professional responsibility and personal conscience” (p. 62). ese responsibilities force an individual to grapple with the questions of who undertakes research and in whose interest, who the research belongs to, who writes and gets credit for authorship, how public the ndings are, and what eect and status they have (Davies, 1999). In fact, as a member of the LSA ad hoc committee charged with draing and vetting the LSA Ethics Statement, I found that the areas that required the most careful language and that were the most dicult to negotiate with fellow linguists were ethical obligations to the “other”: the individuals and communities whom we treat as research subjects. Indeed, within the eld of linguistics, the less powerful and more “other” a community or individual is perceived as being, the more attention linguists tend to pay to the possible ethical ramications within that community. us, the largest body of work on ethical concerns in linguistics deliberates either eld research on minority languages or sociolinguistic research on minority populations, oen within or in connection to a majority language educational system. In fact, these are both the focus of a thoughtful 2006 issue of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. Although this bent in the anthropology and linguistics literature may appear to be just more emphasis on the “other” in an eort to understand and position ourselves, consideration of a variety of communities with a focus on their dierences is not necessarily without practical motivation. In particular, academics from native communities have a long-standing commitment to self-determination and cultural sovereignty (Champagne & Goldberg, 2005; Deloria, 1969). is commitment results in a literature that has repeatedly exposed the naïveté of academic researchers from the cultural majority who come to a minority, impoverished community, oen with a “noble” goal of advocacy, but with little real knowledge and experience of the historical and cultural complexities providing context for the research. eir vague assurances of progress and frequent subsequent failure to provide tangible benets to the language community create even more cynicism
regarding the academic enterprise and the continued presence of researchers (see Trechter, 1999). Yet most linguists, if they acknowledge the complexity of dierent on-site contexts, oen do so only in passing. Bowern (2008), for instance, warns linguists of the culturally grounded ethical complexity of dierent situations:
I have talked about ethics as though there is just one ethical way to behave in research, and one system to satisfy. at is not true. Ethics are strongly a function of culture, and what may be considered ethical in one community would be unethical in another.
