ABSTRACT
Since the late 1980s, like other researchers who focus on people’s behavior and social practices, sociolinguists have been increasingly required to abide by principles of ethical responsibility and to demonstrate their commitment to these principles in a formal way. As sociolinguists have amply documented, language may be involved in the marginalization of groups in number of ways. Such is the case of socioculturally devalued non-standard dialects. One aspect of researchers’ responsibility in this case that has received some sustained attention is the potential consequence of the choices researchers make when transcribing speech, which can tacitly reproduce power asymmetries and social inequalities. The seemingly innocuous arrangement of speakers’ turns on a page, for example, visually privileges certain speakers, and the use of non-standard orthographic conventions, while constituting a powerful expressive tool, may reinforce the social devaluation of non-standard ways of speaking.
