Some views on ethical rights and responsibilities relating to linguistic data collection from endangered indigenous languages

Do those people, who primarily live in urban cities, have the ethical right to conduct linguistic field surveys among those indigenous speech communities to which they do not belong? This question has been haunting language investigators, dialectologists and field linguists for years and they are yet to find a way to successfully defend their right to work among the indigenous speech communities. This question arises because, in many situations, it is observed that the members of indigenous speech communities have raised questions about why these urban people come to their living places to procure data from their language and language-related information, which they are not often willing to share with the ‘outsiders’. This leads to the generation of many unwanted conflicts and the ‘outsiders’ need to affirm, in some way or the other, that as outsiders they have no legitimate right to sneak into the life of an indigenous speech community, and that they must have prior approval or consent from community members before recording and collecting linguistic data and information from them. Besides this primary ethical question, many other ethical issues are directly related to participation and involvement of members of an indigenous speech community in linguistic field surveys for providing data and information.