Mobile surveys for data collection: A case study of Kanauji

Main Article Content

Anu Pandey

This paper demonstrates how mobiles can be effectively adopted for language documentation fieldwork through case studies in Kanauji during COVID-19. Remote fieldwork conditions in India support data collection via mobiles, over laptops or computers, especially for low-resource languages like Kanauji. Telephonic surveys have been used extensively for corpora creation; however, their use in remote language data collection is new. The popular messenger WhatsApp can effectively be used for remote linguistic fieldwork in India. Its multimedia features and low network requirement are a boon. WhatsApp is used for asynchronous elicitation of conversational recordings in Kanauji. The dynamics and ethics of mobile fieldwork documentation differ from traditional fieldwork. However, if the challenges are addressed effectively, it can prove to be a viable model for language documentation.

Keywords
remote fieldwork, Kanauji, mobile interviews, COVID-19, conversational recordings

Article Details

How to Cite
Pandey , Anu. “Mobile surveys for data collection: A case study of Kanauji”. Dialectologia: revista electrònica, 2025, no. 34, pp. 181-04, doi:10.1344/DIALECTOLOGIA.34.8.
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