ABSTRACT
Ethnography is the study of how the members of a community behave and why they behave in that way. Ethnography is normally conducted through prolonged observation and direct participation in community life in the form of ethnographic fieldwork. The inherently interpretive nature of ethnography is the methodology’s greatest strength as well as its greatest potential weakness. By rejecting the idea that knowledge of social practice can exist independently of the people engaged in that practice, ethnography works to avoid the twin pitfalls of reductionism and essentialism that are endemic to much of the research in a so-called positivist paradigm. For sociolinguists, engaging in realist ethnography means examining the use of locally meaningful linguistic forms within a community of speakers and then detailing how that use is inextricably linked to larger linguistic patterns and distributions in a given social context. The role of an ethnographer in a community can at times be a difficult one to negotiate.
