ABSTRACT
Through its focus on language, a social phenomenon, consideration of ethics in linguistic research is necessarily framed within a language community and consistently foregrounds issues of shared rights, obligations, and responsibilities. For practitioners of sociolinguistics, attention to personal and community obligations is even more essential. Recent introductions to the methodological approaches to sociolinguistics have continued to include discussions of the ethical problems engendered by the positivist approach and reification of the “observer’s paradox”. Although researchers may focus on ethical issues as they perceive them at the forefront of their own research sites, there are also broader, applied ethical models that may be useful for linguists to consider before going into the field or beginning their own individual research projects. In fact, analyses of ethical obligations are often best grappled with in light of the combined contexts, individual relationships, and sociopolitical relationships necessitated by the field in which a scholar is working.
