Kansanlingvistiikasta kansalaislingvistiikkaan: kielikäsitystutkimusta reflektiivisen kanssatutkimuksen keinoin

This methodological article deals with a sociolinguistic co-research project exploring social awareness of linguistic variation and change, in collaboration with academic researchers, student assistants and lay participants. Co-research was applied in four co-study contexts of which two were organized as single workshops, two in the form of courses. The article concentrates on the latter ones involving high schoolers with varying language backgrounds and adults with also varying professional backgrounds. The article reviews the epistemological and theoretical starting points for co-researching of approaches to language and ‘language regard’ (Preston 2011, 2013) in this collaboration. The focus of the article is twofold: First, the methodology of the co-research practice based on principles of Citizen Science (CS) is presented. Second, since personal relevance is one of the important principles of CS, we address co-researchers’ experiences and feedback of the co-research process and the overall collaboration.