WHAT IS FOLK LINGUISTICS? WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

The aim of the article is to give a characteristics of folk linguistics. The analysis of conversational data, employing various techniques of discourse analysis, is suggested as the best way to uncover folk linguistic belief. Folk linguistics seeks to discover what nonlinguists know about language and to derive from that knowledge evidence of their underlying folk theory of language. Such work is to be done not only for the completeness of the ethnography of language it gives us for a speech community, but also for the clues it may give linguistic theory and language variation and change and the support it may give to those who do applied linguistics.