KPAAM-CAM Sociolinguistic Interview Guide

The KPAAM-CAM Sociolinguistic Interview Guide (SLIG) is a fieldwork tool used by the members of the KPAAM-CAM project (https://kpaam-cam.org) for the collection of data about / from multilingual speakers in rural areas of Cameroon. Unlike most tools used for this purpose, it includes only minimal stimuli for the elicitation of self-reported language use and, instead, contains a number of stimuli for the discussion of the social networks in which respondents participate. Other than for statistical descriptions of the sample and some basic statistical analyses, the data generated through the SLIG can be used, for example, to populate Geographic Information Systems—thanks to the multiple data points about social networks anchored to real-world locations. The main application of SLIG data in KPAAM-CAM lies in the analysis of spontaneous multilingual behaviors: anyone present in recordings made by project members, be they speakers or by-standers, is in principle expected to respond to the SLIG, so that each recorded interaction can be analyzed on the background of ethnographically and biographically "thick" speaker metadata such as those provided b y the SLIG.

The SLIG has been used in research on rural, non-polyglossic multilingualism in Cameroon but can be easily adapted to other contexts where language use is tightly connected with issues of relational identity (see Di Carlo, Esene Agwara, and Ojong Diba 2020, https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.38799, for an introduction to the difference between relational and categorical modes of identification in multilingual behaviors).