I faced various challenges during data collection and analysis, and I will highlight some in this section. I will also discuss some of the measures that I took to counter some of these challenges. One challenge pertains to the cultural ceremonies. Despite being invited and introduced by the family members, I sometimes sensed some discomfort and questioning looks on the part of some of the other guests, especially when I started filming a particular ceremony. To counter this challenge, I asked my research assistant to pause the recordings a bit while I explain to the other guests that I am a student and that I am collecting data on the Samia people and their language for my PhD study. Because I am an insider to the community, I mostly knew at least some of the other guests at the ceremonies that I attended, and it is these people that I would ask to accompany me as I explained myself to the other guests. I would then be given the go ahead to continue filming the ceremony. Of course, that would have caused an interruption, which meant that I missed some parts of the ceremony. Nonetheless, these occurrences were minimal as I always sought permission to record the ceremonies from the families concerned beforehand. The way in which I compensated for the gaps in the recordings of some ceremonies was to attend more ceremonies than I had originally planned to attend. This meant that if I missed certain aspects of one ceremony, I could capture those aspects at other, similar ceremonies.
Another challenge that I faced was that of being an insider. As much as an insider has certain advantages (referred to in section 4.7.1 above) over someone who is from outside the community, being an insider still had its challenges. Sometimes I had to get involved during or after a ceremony, like an introduction ceremony,17 especially if it was for someone that I knew well. If I knew the family and/or their other guests, I would have to socialise with and talk to them at the ceremony. I would then have to remind myself that I am actually at the ceremony in my capacity as researcher and that I needed to get back to checking on my research assistant and taking field notes. As mentioned above, I had a number of ceremonies to choose from, so if I realised that I had missed out on certain aspects at a particular ceremony (due to having to act as a community member for certain periods during the ceremony and not just as a researcher), I would ensure that I captured all relevant aspects of
17
As explained in chapter 1, this is a ceremony during which the family of the groom is going to be introduced to the family of the bride. The ceremony is held at the bride‘s home, usually in the village (not the town).
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another ceremony (especially where I had no contacts with the people at that ceremony), after which I would look at the two recordings and two sets of field notes to compare them.
During some of the interviews that I held at one of the local leader‘s homestead, the overall head of the home wanted to be around while I conducted some of the interviews. I sensed discomfort about this in the members of his household. What made the matter more complex is that he was the one who had introduced me to those being interviewed. I interviewed a few people in his presence but later requested him politely to excuse us. He understood my request and left us. From then on, I would always explain to the people who introduced me to participants that if they stayed, the people would not be comfortable, and this helped me to overcome this challenge.
The approach that I employed in this study also posed some challenges for me as a researcher. An ethnographic study, as explained in section 4.3 above, requires a lot of time in the field; I was supposed to live with the respondents for a long time to be able to fully understand their behaviour, especially as regards to how they use language in different situations. Given that my PhD programme was a funded three-year programme (after the three years, I would have had to fund my own studies, and my personal finances would not have allowed me to do so), I did not have all the time I would have liked to live in Busia so as to fully understand the members of the Samia community. I could only live with the Lusamia speakers for an uninterrupted period of six months, after which I kept going back from time to time, having consultations and attending some more ceremonies whenever I had a chance to do so. This means that I did not lose contact with the community and my participants after the six-month period; all through my data analysis and writing up of my findings, I kept in touch with the members of the Samia community. This helped me confirm certain issues that were still not very clear to me and allowed continuous consultations and clarification and confirmation of my interpretation of the data even during the data analysis and writing up phases of the study.
Another limitation to the study was that most of the Lusamia speakers who participated in the interviews expected payment for their participation, so as soon as they were requested to participate, they would ask how much they would be paid. From this, one could clearly see that other researchers had conducted studies in this community before me18 and that researchers from some organisations offered the participants money, before or after
18
In the recent past, different Non-Governmental Organisations had been conducting research here, especially on health related issues like HIV and basic hygiene.
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participating in interviews or filling out questionnaires. The local leaders that introduced me to the participants had to explain to the interview participants that I was a student and lacked sufficient research funds to pay them for their participation; that Busia is my home area (in the case of Busia, Uganda); and that, if they consented to participation, they should give me the necessary information that I needed without expecting payment as, through my study, the Samia people and their language would be read about and become known beyond the Samia community. On the Kenyan side of the border, the local leaders would explain to the participants that I was a daughter of their relatives from across the border and, since we are one people, they should avail to me the information that I needed without requesting payment. This explanation had to be given to the participants in both the individual and the focus group discussions. This of course was time consuming as the explanation had to be given to participants in the individual interviews individually – only in the case of the focus group discussions could the local leader address a group of them together. Since people in these communities respect their local leaders, I was able to carry out the interviews without paying the participants for their participation.
Organising and analysing the data that I collected was also another challenge that I faced. I had data from the interviews (both individual and focus group discussions), observations at cultural ceremonies, in the markets, at events held by members from both communities, recordings of different cultural ceremonies, etc. I had to transcribe the interviews which were in Lusamia and later translate them into English. This was a very tedious process. In theory, I could have employed someone to help me with the transcriptions, but, like I explained above, I had financial constraints and I also wanted to engage with the data that I had collected. In addition to transcribing the interviews, I had to turn the video recordings into text – sometimes it was in Lusamia, sometimes in Luganda, or sometimes in three different languages (as I explain in chapters 5 and 6), but I had to translate these into English before I could embark on writing. One challenge was that, although I speak all the languages present in the recordings, I am not a mother-tongue speaker of all of them/ I overcame this challenge by giving these transcriptions to experts in the different languages to ascertain whether they were accurate and later giving the English translations to them to ensure that I had translated accurately. This required good planning and was more time consuming than originally thought.
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4.11 Conclusion
This chapter made concrete the methodological approach adopted in the current study, highlighting ethnography as the main research strategy. Within ethnography, the more recent, but now widely used, Linguistic Ethnography (LE) was deemed most appropriate for this kind of study, where language is studied as it is used by people in their everyday social interactions. Issues of ethical clearance were discussed, starting with seeking permission from the concerned research bodies to seeking consent from the participants in the study. In ethnographic studies, there is use of social networks, where the one who knows the researcher introduces him/her to another person; in my case, I was an insider to the community, because Busia is my family‘s home town. Even so, I asked the local council leaders to introduce me to potential participants, and this helped me gain access to larger sections of the communities. In order to obtain data from those people who have the experiences that are of interest to my study, I used purposive sampling.
To ensure adequate and reliable data, triangulation was used: the two types of interviews supplemented the observations and linguistic landscaping. The data analysis took the form of thematic analysis, and as I analysed the data that I collected, two major themes emerged, namely (i) multilingualism as linguistic repertoire and (ii) language, spacialisation and identity. I observed that the two communities under study are multilingual and the members of the two communities use different languages in the different spaces that they find themselves in. More than 90% of the people in these communities speak more than one language in the different interactions that they are engaged in both within and across the border. I divided up these broad themes into several sub-themes that further explain the main themes. In the next two chapters, data that supports the different subthemes is presented, interpreted, discussed and interpreted against existing theory as found in the literature.
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CHAPTER FIVE
MULTILINGUALISM AS A LINGUISTIC REPERTOIRE
5.1 Introduction
This chapter is the first in which I present the data and discuss some salient findings. In this chapter, I discuss findings centred on one theme, that is, multilingualism as linguistic repertoire. The linguistic repertoires of my participants are such that it is difficult to isolate particular languages and/or varieties (although I do this to some extent in my discussion, to make certain points salient). Rather, the multiplicity of linguistic forms that my participants know – rather than the choice of particular language(s) – enables them to interact in a number of social situations. This is akin to the concept of multicompetence (Cook 2003), developed in psycholinguistics, which refers to knowledge of two or more languages in one mind. Cook (2003: 5) says the following about so-called multicompetent L2 users: ―The L2 user has other uses for language than the monolingual‖ and the L2 users‘ knowledge of both their L1 and their L2(s) is different from the knowledge of monolingual speakers of the same languages. Thus the linguistic varieties that make up the linguistic repertoire of the multilinguals in my study are different from that of monolinguals. So the difference is not only one of quantity; the linguistic repertoire also works differently in interaction. I discuss the fluid and complex nature of these repertoires, as well as the incompleteness of knowledge of various languages. These two points are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are interconnected and are complementary in helping us to understand the complex nature of multilingualism as linguistic repertoire. My point of departure for this chapter is Busch‘s concept of the linguistic repertoire. Busch (2015: 2) suggests that the linguistic repertoire can be investigated from a third-person perspective where the focus is on how ―speakers interact by means of language‖, a second-person perspective, which focuses ―on how they become constituted as speaking subjects through language‖, and lastly a first-person perspective which focuses ―on how they live language as a subjective experience‖. Although my study is grounded in linguistic ethnography and can at first glance be seen as taking only a third-person perspective (through observations), the variety of methods which I used allows me to explore the linguistic repertoire from all of the above-mentioned perspectives. I use data from the interviews, which can be regarded as giving a first-person perspective, as participants reflected on their own experiences. Secondly, I take a third-person perspective in that I draw on my observations and field notes. I also take a second-person perspective in that I investigate how the linguistic
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landscape constitutes ―speaking subjects‖ (Busch, 2015: 2) in the area in which I collected my data.
In this study, I employed the deductive method of identifying themes, as proposed by Braun and Clarke (2006), where the data that I collected determined which themes I created. I looked at my data in relation to the research questions. I then coded the data, after which, as explained in the previous chapter, I embarked on the process of theming, which involves looking through data and giving names to certain portions of data that represent a certain aspect that is crucial to the study at hand (Bryman, 2015). The themes that I identified had various subthemes: The theme, Multilingualism as linguistic repertoire had two subthemes: Fluid and complex linguistic repertoires of Lusamia speakers and Incompleteness of knowledge of languages. The theme, Language, Spacialisation and Identity had the following subthemes: The border as constituting identity, Linguistic practices of the Samia and Contact of the Samia speakers with speakers of other languages. I then used these themes and subthemes as a guide in analyzing my data, as discussed in the following sections of this chapter and later in chapter 6. I will give examples from the data which are representative of the lager data set.