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. 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. Hymes promoted what he and others call "
ethnopoetics", an anthropological method of transcribing and analyzing folklore and oral narrative that pays attention to poetic structures within speech. In reading the transcriptions of Indian
myths, for example, which were generally recorded as prose by the anthropologists who came before, Hymes noticed that there are commonly poetic structures in the wording and structuring of the tale. Patterns of words and word use follow patterned, artistic forms. Hymes' goal, in his own mind, is to understand the artistry and "the competence... that underlies and informs such narratives". He created the Dell Hymes Model of Speaking and coined the term
communicative competence within
language education. Narratives can be entertaining stories or important myths about the nature of the world; in addition, narratives can also convey the importance of aboriginal environmental management knowledge such as fish spawning cycles in local rivers or the disappearance of
grizzly bears from Oregon. Hymes believes that all narratives in the world are organized around implicit principles of
form which convey important knowledge and ways of thinking and of viewing the world. He argues that understanding narratives will lead to a fuller understanding of the language itself and those fields informed by storytelling, in which he includes ethnopoetics, sociolinguistics,
psycholinguistics,
rhetoric,
semiotics,
pragmatics, narrative inquiry and
literary criticism. Hymes clearly considers
folklore and narrative a vital part of the fields of linguistics, anthropology and literature; and has bemoaned the fact that so few scholars in those fields are willing and able to adequately include folklore in its original language in their considerations. He feels that the translated versions of the stories are inadequate for understanding the stories' roles in the social or mental system in which they existed. He provides an example that in
Navajo, the
particles (utterances such as "uh," "so," "well," etc. that have linguistic if not
semantic meaning) omitted in the English translation are essential to understanding how the story is shaped and how repetition defines the structure that the text embodies. Hymes was the founding editor for the journal
Language in Society, which he edited for 22 years. ==The "S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G" model==