Researching dialects with high school students: a citizen science approach

Abstract Citizen science as a form of inquiry inviting nonprofessionals into different phases of the research process appeared in linguistics in the last decade. However, few such projects aim to study dialectal features, even though renewal would benefit dialectology. This methodological paper explores possible ways of applying citizen science in research on dialects. A specific small-scale study is presented which was conducted in the 2023/2024 academic year in Hungary with high school citizen scientists living in the Northern (so-called Palóc) dialect area. In this study, experimental and citizen scientific methods were combined, resulting in a corpus consisting of unique dialect data suitable for the acoustic study of inter- and intra-speaker variation, recorded without the presence of professional researchers. Drawing on the experiences of this project, the article examines how the contribution to science and the contribution to the public, two important criteria of citizen science projects, were achieved. It is claimed that the project helped to enhance the scientific literacy of the participating high school citizen scientists, as well as their agency in the local public.