Dell Hymes - Significance of His Work

Significance of His Work

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 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” (Hymes 2003:vii). He created the Dell Hymes Model of Speaking and coined the term communicative competence within language education.

In addition to being entertaining stories or important myths about the nature of the world, narratives 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 (Hymes 1981:6-7). He feels that the translated versions of the stories are inadequate for understanding their role 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.