Vestlusanalyüs

Vestlusanalyüs is a scholarly field that studies the structure and meaning of talk in everyday Estonian-language interaction. It treats spoken interaction as a series of observable social actions organized in sequence, with attention to how participants initiate, respond to, and repair conversations. Drawing on the broader tradition of conversation analysis, vestlusanalyüs adapts methods to emphasize Estonian-speaking communities, social norms, and communicative practices.

In practice, vestlusanalyüs involves recording natural conversations, producing meticulous transcripts, and analyzing turn-taking, adjacency pairs, repair, topic management, and sequence organization. Researchers focus on how participants construct shared understanding, manage power and politeness, and enact social actions like requests, refusals, or agreements within real-time talk. Transcription conventions are adapted to capture features important in Estonian discourse, while maintaining comparability with international CA studies.

Applications of vestlusanalyüs include empirical studies of everyday talk, institutional interactions (education, healthcare, media), and the sociolinguistic analysis of regional or social variation in Estonian speech. The approach seeks rigorous, case-based insights rather than broad generalizations, and it often collaborates with sociolinguistics, anthropology, and discourse studies.

Challenges include ensuring reliability in qualitative transcription, addressing speaker anonymity and consent, and navigating cross-cultural interpretation when comparing with CA research in other languages.