Early Life and Education
He was educated at Reed College, studying under David H. French, and graduated in 1950 after a stint in prewar Korea. His work in the Army as a decoder is part of what influenced him to become a linguist. Hymes earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1955, and took a job at Harvard University.
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.
Hymes remained at Harvard for five years, leaving in 1960 to join the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. He spent five years at Berkeley as well, and then joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 (where he succeeded A. Irving Hallowell). In 1972 he joined the Department of Folklore and Folklife and became Dean of Graduate School of Education in 1975.
He served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1982, of the American Anthropological Association in 1983, and of the American Folklore Society - the last person to have held all three positions. He was a member of the Guild of Scholars of The Episcopal Church. 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.
His spouse, Virginia Hymes, is also a sociolinguist and folklorist.
Read more about this topic: Dell Hymes
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“That poor little thing was a good woman, Judge. But she just sort of let life get the upper hand. She was born here and she wanted to be buried here. I promised her on her deathbed she’d have a funeral in a church with flowers. And the sun streamin’ through a pretty window on her coffin. And a hearse with plumes and some hacks. And a preacher to read the Bible. And folks there in church to pray for her soul.”
—Laurence Stallings (1804–1968)
“... in the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment ...”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)