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Linguistic anthropologists draw upon an eclectic mixture of research methods. In order to answer one type of research question, it might be necessary to videotape or tape-record hundreds of hours of conversation, while another might require sorting through all of a government’s language policy documents over a period of decades, and yet another might require nothing more (or less) than a Google search of the word “mañana” – though in the latter case, there is almost always a deep background of ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork preceding the collection of data in the form of a Google search (cf. Hill 2005). Most linguistic anthropologists end up collecting many different kinds of data through many different research methods.

The type of information collected by linguistic anthropologists might be quantitative or qualitative – or often both. Quantitative data can be counted; the researcher is investigating the quantities of something.² A researcher might, for example, conduct a survey about people’s opinions and count how many feel strongly about a particular subject or measure the length of pauses in the utterances of different speakers. Qualitative methods, on the other hand, do not involve counting anything. Instead, a researcher who uses qualitative methods is interested in looking in-depth at some aspect of human behavior in order to understand it more deeply, often from the perspectives of the people being studied. For instance, linguistic and cultural anthropologists often live for long periods of time in the communities they are studying in order to observe and participate in daily life, thereby learning about and absorbing as many of the details of cultural norms and social practices as possible.

Many linguistic anthropologists advocate “triangulating” the data – that is, using multiple methods in order to gather different kinds of data in an attempt to obtain a fuller picture of the multimodal phenomena under study. Some of the most commonly employed research methods in linguistic anthropology are described below. This is just a partial list of the many different research methods used by linguistic anthropologists. Whatever methods linguistic anthropologists draw upon, however, their main goal is to gather information about language use in actual social contexts.