Fieldwork is hard.

Luo is a language of the Nilotic family spoken by about one million people in Nyanza Province in Kenya in east central Africa. Mr. Ben Blount, then a student at the University of California in Berkeley, went to Kenya in 1967 to make a study of the development of language in eight children encompassing the age range from 12 to 35 months. He intended to make his central procedure the collection on a regular schedule of large samples of spontaneous speech at home, usually with the mother as interpreter. In American and European families, at least of the middle class, it is usually possible to obtain a couple of hundred utterances in as little as a half an hour, at least it is so, once any shyness has passed. Among the Luo, things proved more difficult. In 54 visits of a half an hour or longer Mr. Blount was only able to obtain a total from all the children of 191 multi-word utterances. The problem was primarily one of Luo etiquette, which requires that small children be silent when adults come to visit, and the small children Mr. Blount visited could not throw off their etiquette even though their parents entreated them to speak for the visiting “European,” as Mr. Blount was called.

(Excerpt from A first language: The early stages by Roger Brown, p. 73. There’s a happy ending: Mr. Blount became Dr. Blount in 1969.)

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