Sociolinguistic bias, effects, and implications of applying the interview technique: The linguistically minimizing interview

Abstract

Since the end of the 20th century, especially in the Anglophone world, the scientific community has reflected how linguistic imperialism and monolinguistic language policies affect some methodological practices in a context of language contact. In this regard, the interview technique deserves special attention because of the choice of interview language often give preference to a certain language more by linguistic prejudices of researcher-interviewer than by a true methodological advantage. This article presents a review of the theoretical approaches in several disciplines and interdisciplines that have discussed this issue in social research in social research, and also their position regarding the need and advantages of incorporating the sociolinguistic dimension to the design, translation, and application of the interview. Thus, if we take reference to the Hispanic Community in a glocal context, we see how the omission or recognition of this dimension may be affecting the research, in particular the collection of information by interviewing, and also the speech communities in multilingual contexts as subjects subject to linguistic marginalization and discrimination. Likewise, it reflects on how the effects of monolingual linguistic nationalism have promoted prejudices and habits that generate conditions so that the interview as an information gathering technique becomes a means of linguistic minoritization. For the same reason, the researcher-interviewer becomes a linguistic agent that reproduces linguicide linguistic attitudes and ideologies. In this way, both the awareness and responsibility of the sociolinguistic implications that our field work (the interview planning, design, adaptation, translation, and application) may have within a given multilingual context, is what can encourage researchers-interviewers to improve the validity and quality of intercultural and multilingual research. Also, it contributes to linguistic and epistemic sustainability when the researcher-interviewer reflects on their role as a linguistic agent in situations of conflict and linguistic discrimination, avoiding the use of linguistically minoritizing interviews (LMI).