ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the methods that become central to sociolinguistics over the years: the sociolinguistic interview. Interviews have been a favoured mode of data collection among sociolinguists for years. Traditionally, sociolinguists are happy to have audio recordings, for many years that were the only feasible option, but increasingly researchers are using video as their basic record. Sociolinguists are interested in vernacular, informal speech. They are good and quick, way to collect quite substantial amounts of talk and they are especially attractive because of the kind of speech that one collects in them. It is possible to take a completely hands-off approach to collecting speech, and methods of data collection that are informed by the anthropological notion of the participant-observer. People collect demographic data about their participants and think carefully about where they conduct their recording session. A good interview is co-constructed; this means that the conversational topics are suggested and led by the interviewee as well as by the interviewer.
