2022 Volume 25 Issue 1 Pages 134-141
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought research on Japanese and Ryukyuan dialects to a standstill, hindering researchers from conducting fieldwork. In the early stages of the pandemic, the dialect research community responded by discussing relevant issues, sharing ideas about alternative research methods, and creating research environments specifically designed for the current situation. This study provides an overview of the various responses of the community to the pandemic situation and prospects for future research. First, it presents three types of reactions to the pandemic from the research community, namely, grass-root gatherings for information exchange, organizational activities of academic societies, and support for individual researchers conducting online interviews. Following this, we discuss various alternative research methods with a special focus on how they been shared and discussed among researchers. Taking into consideration the issue of fieldwork, one of the authors has proposed a guideline for conducting linguistic fieldwork that is specifically designed for the COVID-19 pandemic situation. In conclusion, the present paper provides prospects for future research with emphasis on the positive consequences of the pandemic on dialect research.
