ABSTRACT
Sociolinguistic fieldworkers often apply a broad stroke when referring to their method of data collection as a sociolinguistic interview, allowing the term to stand for any face-to-face interaction that is recorded for use as sociolinguistic data. This chapter distinguishes between this broad use of “sociolinguistic interview” and what I refer to as “The Sociolinguistic Interview,” defined more narrowly here as a methodology developed within the Labovian variationist paradigm with the goal of systematically eliciting variation across contextual styles for use as the primary evidence for sociolinguistic stratification and linguistic change. A strict definition allows for an emphasis on the specific utility of data gathered from The Sociolinguistic Interview in relation to other recordings of naturalistic speech and is meant to stress the importance of making informed methodological choices when gathering sociolinguistic interview data.
