Vowel quantity in West Swedish - the villain of the piece?

In English This paper consists of two, somewhat disparate parts. In the first part, some experiences of two years of fieldwork are summarized, concentrating, as the subtitle suggests, on the very heart of phonetic fieldwork: the encounters and interviews with the informants. As a result of the fieldwork, the project now has access to recordings from approximately 1300 speakers of more than 100 dialects of Swedish. We are currently initiating research on various aspects of the sound patterns of these dialects. The second part of the paper is meant to give an overview of some of our research plans for the near future.