Commentary Language Ideology—A Personal Reflection

Despite the growing popularity of corpus linguistic methodology in language ideology studies, dedicated discussions of the challenges involved are rare. In this chapter, I revisit my experience devising a complex, corpus-based study of metalinguistic discourses and language ideologies to offer a systematic discussion of the challenges I encountered along the way. The discussion is organized into thematic sections that roughly follow the outline of an empirical journal article (data collection and sampling; analytical tools; analytical techniques; study design, interpretation, and reporting; and publication), discussing the challenges associated with each stage in the research together. This includes a comparative look at classic corpus linguistic techniques (e.g., concordance, collocation, keyword analysis) and multivariate techniques such as exploratory factor analysis and cluster analysis, discussion of some of the major challenges associated with the application of either set, as well as some possible ways of dealing with these. Despite the challenges, both sets of techniques proved to be useful, even if multivariate techniques do offer something that the classic techniques do not.