---
title: Field Methods & Documentation
description: This subject covers the techniques used to collect, analyze, and preserve linguistic data from spoken languages, especially endangered ones. Learners will understand how to conduct fieldwork, record native speakers, and document grammatical structures.
category: social-sciences
subcategory: linguistics
difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced
url: /subject/field-methods-and-documentation
---

# Field Methods & Documentation

This subject covers the techniques used to collect, analyze, and preserve linguistic data from spoken languages, especially endangered ones. Learners will understand how to conduct fieldwork, record native speakers, and document grammatical structures.

## Available Resources

2 Books • 3 Websites

## Websites

### 1. SIL FieldWorks

Free software suite from SIL International for documenting and analysing languages, combining the FLEx lexicon editor, interlinear text glossing, a morphological parser and grammar sketch tools. Users learn to build dictionaries and analysed text corpora from their own fieldwork data.

**Difficulty:** Beginner | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://software.sil.org/fieldworks/

**Tags:** language-documentation, fieldwork-software, lexicography, interlinear-glossing, morphological-analysis

### 2. eldp.net

ELDP.net is the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme site offering practical guidance and resources for field linguistics and language documentation, including field methods, ethics, data management, and case studies.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://eldp.net

**Tags:** websites, humanities-social-sciences, linguistics

### 3. SIL International

Website of SIL International, a nonprofit working on language documentation, translation and literacy. It publishes fieldwork guidance, orthography development resources, language data and linguistic publications, useful for understanding how under-described languages are recorded, analysed and given writing systems.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free

**Link:** https://sil.org

**Tags:** language-documentation, fieldwork, orthography, endangered-languages, descriptive-linguistics

## Books

### 1. Linguistic Fieldwork

**Author:** Claire Bowern

Claire Bowern's practical handbook for fieldwork on undescribed languages, covering project planning, funding, recording equipment, elicitation of phonology, morphology and syntax, discourse collection, ethics and archiving. Readers learn how to run field sessions and turn raw recordings into usable linguistic analysis.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0230545378?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, linguistics

### 2. Endangered Languages

**Author:** Peter K. Austin

Illustrated reference edited by SOAS field linguist Peter K. Austin, surveying about a thousand of the world's languages region by region, from widely spoken to endangered and extinct. Readers gain a global picture of linguistic diversity, language families, and where and why languages are disappearing.

**Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid

**Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/0520255607?tag=edmonddante07-20

**Tags:** books, humanities-social-sciences, linguistics

---

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