We’d love to deep-dive into this topic over time, but let’s start simple: language survey = research into how people use languages.
If we were only studying languages, we’d be linguists. If we were only studying people, we’d be sociologists. Since it’s both, we’re sociolinguistic researchers.
There are 7000-ish languages around the world, 840-ish in Papua New Guinea (PNG). “-ish” indicates that there is much we don’t know about languages and the people that speak them globally!
We don’t research just to know more. We do applied research, desiring that those we study would benefit from language development. In PNG, many languages that people grow up speaking – “vernaculars” – are unwritten. Pause and think about that. Many times, an organization like ours is instrumental in developing literature and literacy.
Many PNGans who speak unwritten languages do have access to literature in other languages they speak. Most people in PNG are multilingual. Is this sounding complex yet? Determining what people do with languages, why they do it, and what kinds of development would actually help… our job as surveyors is somewhere in there.