Cover not available

In:Handbook of Pragmatics: 26th Annual Installment
Edited by Sigurd D’hondt, Pedro Gras, Mieke Vandenbroucke and Frank Brisard
[Handbook of Pragmatics 26] 2023
► pp. 47–66

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Dell Hymes and communicative competence

 | UCLA
Published online: 16 October 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/hop.26.hym1
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Biography and career
  • 3.Communicative competence
  • 4.Communicative competence and pragmatics
  • 5.Hymes’ own explorations of communicative competence
  • 6.Continuing influence and recognition
  • References
References (73)
References
Agha, Asif. 2003. “The social life of cultural value.” Language & Communication 23: 231–73. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Albert, Ethel M. 1972. “Cultural patterning of speech behavior in Burundi.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics, ed. by John J. Gumperz and Dell H. Hymes, 72–105. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy, John R. Rickford, and Arnetha F. Ball, (eds). 2016. Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bachman, Lyle and Adrian Palmer. 2010. Language Assessment in Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Basso, Keith H. 1970. “‘To give up on words’: Silence in Western Apache culture.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26 (3): 213–230. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1979. Portraits of the Whiteman: Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols Among the Western Apache. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard and Joel Sherzer (eds). 1974. Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bernstein, Basil. 1964. “Elaborated and restricted codes: Their social origins and some consequences.” In The Ethnography of Communication, ed. by John J. Gumperz and Dell H. Hymes, American Anthropologist 66 (6), Part 2, 55–69. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blom, Jan P. & John J. Gumperz. 1972. “Social meaning in linguistic structures: Code-switching in Norway.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics, ed. by John J. Gumperz and Dell H. Hymes, 407–434. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan. (ed). 1999. Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: DeGruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. “Ethnography and democracy: Hymes’s political theory of language.” Text & Talk 29: 257–276. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Briggs, Charles L. 1988. Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Canale, Michael. 1983. “From communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy.” In Language and Communication, ed. by J. C. Richard and R. W. Schmidt, 2–14. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Canale, Michael and Merrill Swain. 1980. “Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing.” Applied Linguistics 1 (1): 1–47. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caton, Steven C. 1987. “Contributions of Roman Jakobson.” Annual Review of Anthropology 16: 233–260. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cazden, Courtney. 2011. “Dell Hymes’s construct of “communicative competence.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 42(4):364–369. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Celce-Murcia, Marianne, Zoltan Dornyei, and Sarah Thurrell. 1995. “Communicative competence: a Pedagogically motivated model with content specifications.” Issues in Applied Linguistics 6 (2): 5–35. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge MS: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1966. Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Duranti, Alessandro. 1992. “Intentions, self, and responsibility: An essay in Samoan ethnopragmatics.” In Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse, ed. by Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine, 24–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Foster, Michael K. 1974. “When words become deeds: An analysis of three Iroquois longhouse speech events.” In Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. By Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 354–367. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Frake, Charles O. 1980. “How to enter a Yakan house.” In Language and Cultural Description: Essays by Charles O. Frake, ed. By Anwar S. Dil, 214–232. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gal, Susan and Judith T. Irvine. 2019. Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garfinkel, Harold. 1972. “Remarks on ethnomethodology.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics, ed. by John J. Gumperz and Dell H. Hymes, 309–324. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gumperz, John J. 1968. “The Speech Community.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 9:381–386.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gumperz, John J. and Dell Hymes. (eds). 1972. Directions in Sociolinguistics: the Ethnography of Communication. Holt, Rinhart, & Winston.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gutierrez, Kris D. and Barbara Rogoff. 2003. “Cultural ways of learning: Individual ways or repertoires of practice.” Educational Researcher 32 (5): 19–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heller, Monica and Bonnie McElhinny. 2017. Language, Capitalism, and Colonialism: Toward a Critical History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Huang, Yan. 2014. Pragmatics (second edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hymes, Dell. H. 1959. “Myth and tale titles of the Lower Chinook.” In The Journal of American Folklore, 72 (284), 139–145. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1964. “Toward Ethnographies of Communication.” In American Anthropologist 66 (6): 1–34. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hymes, Dell H. 1966. “Two types of linguistic relativity (with examples from Amerindian ethnography). In Sociolinguistics, ed. by William Bright, 114–157. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1967. “The anthropology of communication.” In Human Communication Theory, ed. by Frank E. Dance, 1–39. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1971. “Competence and performance in linguistic theory.” In Language Acquisition, Models and Methods, ed. by Renira Huxley and Elisabeth Ingram, 3–28. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1972. “On communicative competence.” In Sociolinguistics, ed. by J. B. Pride and Janet Holmes, 269–293. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1975. “Pre-war Prague school and post-war American anthropological linguistics.” In The Transformational-Generative Paradigm and Modern Linguistic Theory, ed. by E. F. Koerner, 359–380. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1980a. “Speech and language: On the origins and foundations of inequality among speakers. In Language in education: Ethnolinguistic essays, ed. by Dell H. Hymes, 19–61. Washington, D.C: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1980b. “What is ethnography?” In Language in education: Ethnolinguistic Essays, ed. by Dell H. Hymes, 88–103. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1981. “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1992. “The concept of communicative competence revisited.” In Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution, ed. by Martin Pütz, 31–58. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1996. Ethnography, Linguistics, and Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice. London: Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2003. Now I Only Know So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(ed). 1964. Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith. 1974. “Strategies of status manipulation in the Wolof greeting. In Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. by Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 167–191. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 350–377. Cambridge, MS: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Keenan, Elinor [Ochs]. 1974. “Norm-makers, norm-breakers: Uses of speech by men and women in a Malagasy community.” In Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. by Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 125–143. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kroskrity, Paul V. 1998. Arizona Tewa kiva speech as a manifestation of a dominant language ideology. In Language Ideology: Practice and Theory, ed. by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, 103–122. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2011. “Getting negatives in Arizona Tewa: On the relevance of ethnopragmatics and language ideologies to understanding a case of grammaticalization. Pragmatics (IPrA) 20: 91–107.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(ed). 2000. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kroskrity, Paul V. and Anthony K. Webster (eds). 2015. The Legacy of Dell Hymes: Ethnopoetics, Narrative Inequality, and Voice. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leung, Constant. 2005. “Convivial communication: Recontexualizing communicative competence.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 15 (2): 119–144. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levitsky, Steven and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McCarty, Teresa L. (ed). 2011. Ethnography and Language Policy. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McCarty, Teresa L., Mary Eunice Romero-Little, Larisa Warhol, and Ofelia Zepeda. 2011. “Critical ethnography and Indigenous language survival.” In Ethnography and Language Policy, ed. by Teresa L. McCarty, 30–51. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mertz, Elizabeth. 1998. “Linguistic Ideology and Praxis in a U.S. Law School Classroom.” In Language Ideology: Practice and Theory, ed. by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, 149–162. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia. 1972. “Signifying and marking: Two African-American speech acts.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics, ed. by John J. Gumperz and Dell H. Hymes, 161–179. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moore, Robert E. 2008. Listening to Indians. Reed Magazine, Winter, 87(1): 12–17.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morris, Charles W. 1938. “Foundations of the theory of signs. In International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, ed. by Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap, and Charles W. Morris, 7–138. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rosa, Jonathan. 2019. Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sapir, Edward. 1949. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. David G. Mandelbuam, ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schieffelin, Bambi, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, (eds). 1998. Language Ideology: Practice and Theory. Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sherzer, Joel. 1974. “Namakke, sunmakke, kormakke: Three types of Cuna speech event.” In Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. by Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 263–282. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 1979. “Language structure and linguistic ideology.” In The Elements: Parasesession on Linguistic Units and Levels, ed. by, Paul R. Clyne, William F. Hanks and Carol L. Hofbauer, 193–247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2003. “Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life.” Language & Communication 23(3–4): 193–229. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. Dell Hathaway Hymes. Language 86: 933–939. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Slobin, Dan (ed). 1967. A field manual for cross-cultural study of the acquisition of communicative competence. Berkeley, CA: Psychology Department UC-Berkeley.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Verschueren, Jef. 1999. Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Costuchen, Alexia Larchen, Agustin Reyes-Torres & Juan Carlos Tordera Yllescas
2025. Analysis of Movie Trailers Based on a WSH Game Prototype. In Literacy Policies for Equity and Inclusion, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue