Dell Hymes

Dell Hathaway Hymes (June 7, 1927, in Portland, Oregon – November 13, 2009, in Charlottesville, Virginia) was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use.

His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest.

He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics".

The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline (linguistics).

He was educated at Reed College, studying under David H. French; and after a stint in prewar Korea, he graduated in 1950.

His work in the Army as a decoder is part of what influenced him to become a linguist.

Hymes studied with Burke in the 1950s.

Burke's work was theoretically and topically diverse, but the idea that seems most influential on Hymes is the application of rhetorical criticism to poetry.

Hymes has included many other literary figures and critics among his influences, including Robert Alter, C. S. Lewis, A. L. Kroeber, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

As one of the first sociolinguists, Hymes helped to pioneer the connection between speech and social relations, placing linguistic anthropology at the center of the performative turn within anthropology and the social sciences more generally.

Hymes formulated a response to Noam Chomsky's influential distinction between competence (knowledge of grammatical rules necessary to decoding and producing language) and performance (actual language use in context).

Hymes objected to the marginalization of performance from the center of linguistic inquiry and proposed the notion of communicative competence, or knowledge necessary to use language in social context, as an object of linguistic inquiry.

Since appropriate language use is conventionally defined, and varies across different communities, much of Hymes early work frames a project for ethnographic investigation into contrasting patterns of language use across speech communities.

Hymes termed this approach "the ethnography of speaking".

The SPEAKING acronym, described below, was presented as a lighthearted heuristic to aid fieldworkers in their attempt to document and analyze instances of language use, which he termed "speech events".

Embedded in the acronym is an application and extension of Roman Jakobson's arguments concerning the multifunctionality of language.

He articulated other, more technical, often typologically oriented approaches to variation in patterns of language use across speech communities in a series of articles.

As a result of discussions primarily with Ray Birdwhistell at the University of Pennsylvania, in his later work, Hymes renamed the "ethnography of speaking" the "ethnography of communication" to reflect the broadening of focus from instances of language production to the ways in which communication (including oral, written, broadcast, acts of receiving/listening) is conventionalized in a given community of users, and to include nonverbal as well as verbal behavior.

Hymes earned his PhD in linguistics from Indiana University in 1955.

As a young Ph.D graduate, Hymes carefully analyzed a corpus, within the publication by Melville Jacobs of the songs and stories of Victoria Howard, developing new approaches to the interpretation of oral narratives.

He went on to take a job at Harvard University.

From 1955, Hymes taught at Harvard University for five years; leaving in 1960 to join the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley; where he spent another five years before joining the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 (where he succeeded A. Irving Hallowell).

With Erving Goffman and John Szwed, he established the Center for Urban Ethnography in 1969.

The goal was to fund research by both faculty and students at Penn that used urban ethnography as the primary method, and much innovative research resulted.

The first major grant came from the National Institute of Mental Health, funding much research emphasizing different racial and ethnic groups; the second from the U.S. National Institute of Education, funding classroom ethnography.

With Erving Goffman he co-edited the series Conduct and Communication for the University of Pennsylvania Press as a way to support research they considered most valuable.

In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society and served as its editor for 22 years.

In 1972 he joined the Department of Folklore and Folklife and in 1975 he became Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

He served as president of the American Folklore Society in 1973, the Linguistic Society of America in 1982, and the American Anthropological Association in 1983—the last person to have held all three positions.

While at Penn, Hymes was a founder of the journal Language in Society.

Hymes later joined the Departments of Anthropology and English at the University of Virginia, where he became the Commonwealth Professor of Anthropology and English, and from which he retired in 2000, continuing as emeritus professor until his death from complications of Alzheimer's disease on November 13, 2009.

Hymes was accused of sexual harassment in the later years of his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hymes was influenced by a number of linguists, anthropologists and sociologists; notably Franz Boas, Edward Sapir and Harry Hoijer of the Americanist Tradition; Roman Jakobson and others of the Prague Linguistic Circle; sociologist Erving Goffman and anthropologist Ray L. Birdwhistell, both his colleagues at Penn; and ethnomethodologists Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson.

Hymes' career can be divided into at least two phases.

In his early career Hymes adapted Prague School Functionalism to American Linguistic Anthropology, pioneering the study of the relationship between language and social context.

Together with John Gumperz, Erving Goffman and William Labov, Hymes defined a broad multidisciplinary concern with language in society.

Hymes' later work focuses on poetics, particularly the poetic organization of Native American oral narratives.

He and Dennis Tedlock defined ethnopoetics as a field of study within linguistic anthropology and folkloristics.

Hymes considers literary critic Kenneth Burke his biggest influence on this latter work, saying, "My sense of what I do probably owes more to KB than to anyone else."

Even at that young age, Hymes had a reputation as a strong linguist; his dissertation, completed in one year, was a grammar of the Kathlamet language spoken near the mouth of the Columbia and known primarily from Franz Boas’s work at the end of the 19th century.