The History of Linguistic Fieldwork

Abstract

A full-fledged history of linguistic fieldwork would be an interesting subtopic within the history of linguistics, and would also be relevant to the history of ethnography, the history of European colonization, and the history of Christian missions. Such a study, which could be conceived as a history of human curiosity about other languages, still needs to be written. In this chapter, we will focus on the history of fieldwork insofar as it is relevant to the modern fieldworker.