This work was first published in three volumes in French in 1971 (followed by a second edition in 1976), under the auspices of the Societe d' etudes linguistiques et antropologiques de France (selaf). It is presented here in English in one volume.

The first book evolved because of a felt need by the authors for a methodology of linguistic research techniques for young researchers doing fieldwork for the first time. The first section, consisting of some basic aspects of gathering and processing data from unwritten languages, developed from a course given by Luc Bouquiaux at the Session of African Linguistics in July 1969 at the Faculte des Lettres of Aix-en-Provence.

Volumes two and three of the original work consist of questionnaires, with accompanying pictures, which are exhaustive in the coverage of terminology of linguistic categories as well as other categories such as time expressions, currency, measures and accounts, medicine, ethnozoology, ethnobotany, kinship terms, and many others. These areas all need investigation since, from the point of view of the authors, "language is equally an instrument of communication and an expression of a social reality."

It is hoped that the English translation will be found to be as indispensable a working tool of field research to current-day researchers as the French volumes have been to fieldworkers over the past couple of decades.