The Field Linguists Society “Opling” (Общество полевых лингвистов - ОПЛинг) is a society of linguists founded in 2021 with the aim of discussing questions directly and indirectly related to language description and documentation.
Our main areas of interest include:
The basic principles shared by our members aim at an ethical cooperation between linguists and native speakers during fieldwork and within the scientific community, supporting the idea of open data and sharing of field material with anyone interested in it.
Opling is a forum for discussing questions related to field linguistics that have not received sufficient attention so far. We believe that free and spontaneous discussion is particularly important for scientific work. Our society has a horizontal structure: any member can participate in or initiate any of our activities to the extent they want. We accept the use of different languages for communication within the society. At the moment, communication within Opling is conducted in Russian and English, but we are open to include more languages according to the needs of our members. Opling does not have an official status, and it is not affiliated with any official organizations. More details of these points are listed in the Mission and Vision statement on our website. To join Opling you just need to send an email to oplingvi@gmail.com or join the Telegram-channel.
To date we have organized six seminars in different rural and urban locations in Russia. These are regular seminars that occur twice a year. Participants gather for a weekend in one place where they discuss some linguistic issues, live and relax together. The past seminars were dedicated to field trips reports, management of collective work during field trips and projects, methodology and ethical issues of working with language consultants, development of databases and many other linguistic problems. We try to take enough time for a thorough and deep discussion, which is why many talks last for 1,5 hours. The coliving of the participants stimulates spontaneous free discussion that leads to new scientific ideas, collaborations and projects.
An additional weekend seminar has taken place in St. Petersburg in February, 2024. It was dedicated mostly to masterclasses on making linguistic maps.
Aleksei Oskolski organized a masterclass on identifying plant species for linguistic descriptive purposes. It took place in the Natural Reserve "Northern coast of the Neva Bay" (near St. Petersburg) in June, 2021.
Detailed information about all the activities can be found on our website. We also encourage Opling members to offer and organize new activities that are in line with the Opling principles.
The aim of the Journal of the Field Linguists Society is in line with that of the Society: we want to provide a platform to share ideas related to linguistic field work. We want to encourage field linguists to share interesting topics from their notes that are not "big" enough for a full research paper but too interesting to keep to themselves. Among other things, the journal accepts descriptions of a linguistic phenomenon of interest, glossed texts, reports of experiences in the field, essays on ethical or methodological problems, or any other short piece that could be of interest to the community. Issues have a fixed release date, but individual papers belonging to an issue are published online as soon as they are ready. The journal is not registered officially and does not have an ISSN-number. However, we provide a DOI-number for each publication uploading it to the Zenodo platform. You can find more practical information about the journal on our website.
The first issue of the Journal of the Field Linguists Society came out on February 3, 2024 and was presented at Opling seminar 6,5 in St. Petersburg. It contains four articles besides this introduction. Tatiana Korol contributed two fairy tales in Ngen which she recorded during her field work in Côte d'Ivoire, accompanied by a short introduction. George Moroz argues in favor of organizing linguistic examples in databases and provides some practical starting points for how to do that. Sonya Oskolskaya describes the use of a Nanai ideophone that accompanies numerals in a particular fairy tale context. And finally, Samira Verhees looks at the pros and cons of different online platforms where academics can share their work and follow colleagues.
The editorial board of the Journal of the Field Linguists Society is not stable yet and can change from one issue to another. The first issue was prepared by Samira Verhees (chief editor), Konstantin Filatov, Stiopa Mikhailov, Chiara Naccarato, Sonya Oskolskaya, Alina Russkikh, Aigul Zakirova. We are also grateful to Ezequiel Koile for reviewing and consultation.
We invite all those who are interested to contact us in order to join our society, or participate in any of our activities! You do not have to be a (active) member of Opling in order to contribute to the Journal.
Email: oplingvi@gmail.com