ABSTRACT
A large proportion of variationist sociolinguistic work is based on interview speech. Interview speech is what it is: speech appropriate to an interview and those interviewed don't make up completely new linguistic strategies for the interview; they rely on those that they use in everyday life anyway. In order to exclude interviewer effects and explore everyday language, many linguists record spontaneous speech: speech that, no matter whether one would have recorded it or not, would have occurred in a similar form anyway. Researchers provide interviewees with audio-recorders and ask them to record their conversations for certain amount of time, or during working hours at their job, recess break at school or weekly social get-togethers. This can facilitate data analysis, because self-recording brings several issues. Ethnographic research focuses not only on what is said, but also on how people orient to what is said and, what isn't said, as well as the effects that participant-observer has on speakers and language use.
