The Interview – A Method for the Ethnolinguistic Investigation of Food Heritage

This paper examines the interview as a methodological tool for the ethnolinguistic investigation of regional food heritage, with particular attention to the ways in which linguistic practices reflect and construct cultural knowledge. Drawing on Dell Hymes’s framework of the ethnography of speaking, the study approaches the interview not merely as a means of eliciting information, but as a situated communicative event shaped by social norms, cultural values, and interactional conventions. Within this perspective, discourse is analyzed in relation to the broader social and cultural structures that condition its production and interpretation. The interview provides access to speakers’ knowledge of traditional food practices, while simultaneously revealing the communicative strategies through which such knowledge is articulated, negotiated and transmitted. By focusing on naturally occurring patterns of speech, the study highlights the dynamic relationship between language, culture and social interaction. In order to analyze the general mechanisms of this type of communication, the paper provides as a case study an interview on traditional food practices, conducted by the author within the project Digitalization of Cultural Food Heritage. The Bacău Region – eCULTFOOD.