ABSTRACT
In this entry I will be discussing procedures used to collect information about the language of a traditional community, with a view to producing a grammar of that language. I will not be treating here the methods needed to gather material for a sociolinguistic study of language-internal variation (see ), nor those for investigating the acquisition of native language by children (see ). The best source on the procedures of linguistic fieldwork remains Samarin (1967), but chapter 7 of Nida (1946) is also a very good summary and is strongly recommended. Much of the outline of elicitation procedures presented herein was learned from Nida.
