Year: 1964
Type: article
Abstract: T HE study of language as it engages human life has a fitful history.So at least it must seem from the ups and downs of technical study of such engagement by linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists, and from the recurrent calls for it to be taken up.More than a generation ago Sapir (1929:165) wrote in words with a quite modern ring:One can only hope that linguists will become increasingly aware of the significance of their subject in the general field of science and will not stand aloof behind a tradition that threatens to become scholastic when not vitalized by interests which lie beyond the formal interest in language itself.Sapir's hope may seem forlorn, if one regards the dominant aspect of linguistics in the first part of the twentieth century.The concern to establish autonomy as subject and profession (to which Sapir contributed notably) has led in many hands to the segregation, often quite narrowly, of that which is to be accepted as properly linguistic from that which is not.Moreover, at a time when many anthropologists have just accustomed themselves to the structural approaches to linguistic form developed in the last generation, new approaches emerge, approaches whose attempts at logical formalization may seem in some hands to carry the linguist's study of language even further from the concerns and perspectives of the anthropologist.Formalization may indeed seem uppermost in the work of descriptive linguists, and many linguists may deny a relation between their study and studies of cultural content and social form.Anthropological linguistics proper, the study of the little-known majority of the world's languages, may come to seem a second-class citizen in the halls of descriptive theory, supplanted in its earlier pride of place with Boas, Sapir, and Bloomfield, as bearer of exceptions and the objectivity gained from the study of alien patterns, by analysts considering their own languages the favored cases for study, and chatting of universals and intuitions.Yet formalization may be a preparation of better means to anthropological ends, and some who are formalists show more concern for the implications their notions have for behavior and the behavioral sciences than do some who are not.Among interests of long-standing anthropological concern, historical linguistics continues to be near the center of the field, and semantics, poetics, and comparative study of animal communication gain prominence.Moreover, there has been since World War II a continuing, even growing, sense of linked interest and purpose on the part of a good many anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and linguists, agreed in one or another way with Sapir (1929:166) that linguists "must become increasingly concerned with the many The Ethnography of Communication anthropological, sociological, and psychological problems which invade the field of language.""Ethnolinguistics," "psycholinguistics," "sociolinguistics"-these, and the older standby, "language and culture," are the chief terms by which one or another common cause between linguistics and other fields, such as anthropology especially, has come to be known in the period since World War II."Linguistics" itself would do, of course, if linguists generally would agree to such a scope for the discipline.Such an event seems unlikely, and composite terms are likely to prevail for some time, wherever something of concern both to linguists and others is in question.The terms cited above do not, however, answer the need set in the context of the present volume.Such terms tend to identify either the correlation of products of separate pre-existent enterprises, or the study of some one portion of the range of problems in which language is correlated with other things.Such activities are essential.Problems of correlation are central to several of the present papers, and some portion of the range is a favored focus for the work of each contributor, some of whom would consider their work to be sociolinguistic in a strict sense, for example, within the general scope the volume represents.Yet if each of the papers begins with language and a particular problem in some way, each has a larger goal, extending its concern to the place of studies of language in some more general conception of an object of study.If, then, we make no choice among terms such as "ethnolinguistics," "sociolinguistics," and "psycholinguistics," it is because we believe that an adequate approach to "the many anthropological, sociological, and psychological problems which invade the field of language" must lay a foundation having characteristics that such terms in their most characteristic and useful senses do not suggest.Our justification for adopting a novel term for the present set of papers thus is that we believe that there is more to current work than the opening up to technical study of many facets of the use and role of language and related codes.Behind the variety and flexibility, there are questions of approach and context adequate to the whole, and, for anthropologists, of their special contribution to the whole.The needed term must be one not only for coordinating language with other things, or for suggesting a portion of the range of problems, but one of general scope.For anthropologists and anthropologically-minded investigators from other disciplines, ethnography of communication seems best to indicate the necessary scope, and to convey and encourage the fundamental contribution they best can make: studies ethnographic in basis, and of communication in the scope and kind of patterned complexity with which they deal.2In short, "ethnography of communication" implies two characteristics that an adequate approach to the problems of language which engage anthropologists must have.Firstly, such an approach cannot simply take separate results from linguistics, psychology, sociology, ethnology, as given, and seek to correlate them, however partially useful such work is.It must call attention to the need for fresh kinds of data, to the need to investigate directly the use of language in contexts of situation so as to discern patterns proper to speech activ-15481433, 1964, 6_PART2, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.
Source: American Anthropologist
Author: DELL HYMES
Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Language: English
Topic: Language and Culture
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2141018189