Dell Hymes

Dell Hymes was an American linguist and anthropologist who founded the ethnography of speaking, later broadened into the ethnography of communication, an approach studying how patterns of speech vary systematically across cultures and social situations. Hymes developed the SPEAKING framework, a mnemonic set of components, including setting, participants, ends, act sequence, key, instrumentalities, norms and genre, for systematically describing and comparing communicative events across different speech communities. Hymes argued against a narrow view of linguistic competence as purely grammatical knowledge, proposing instead the concept of communicative competence, the broader social knowledge speakers need to use language appropriately in context, an idea that strongly influenced sociolinguistics and language education. Hymes co-founded and helped establish linguistic anthropology as a recognized subfield, served as president of the American Anthropological Association, and held academic positions including at the University of Pennsylvania.