Dell Hymes

Influences on his work

Dell Hymes drew on a wide range of thinkers across several fields. His early influences included Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Harry Hoijer from the Americanist tradition, as well as Roman Jakobson and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Later, colleagues at Penn like sociologist Erving Goffman and anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell shaped his work, along with ethnomethodologists Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. Hymes’s career unfolded in two main phases.

Early on, he brought Prague School functionalism into American linguistic anthropology, helping to pioneer the study of language in its social context. Alongside John Gumperz, Erving Goffman, and William Labov, he helped define a broad interdisciplinary interest in language and society. In his later work, Hymes turned to poetics, especially the poetic structure of Native American oral narratives. With Dennis Tedlock, he established ethnopoetics as a field within linguistic anthropology and folklore.

Hymes called literary critic Kenneth Burke his greatest influence on this later work, noting that his sense of what he does owes more to Burke than to anyone else. He studied with Burke in the 1950s. Other literary figures and critics he cited as influences include Robert Alter, C. S. Lewis, A. L. Kroeber, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The "S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G" model

Hymes developed a model to assist the identification and labeling of components of linguistic interaction, driven by his view that to speak a language correctly one needs not only vocabulary and grammar but also the context in which words are used. The model had sixteen components applicable to many sorts of discourse: message form; message content; setting; scene; speaker/sender; addressor; hearer/receiver/audience; addressee; purposes (outcomes); purposes (goals); key; channels; forms of speech; norms of interaction; norms of interpretation; and genres.

He constructed the acronym SPEAKING, grouping the sixteen components within eight divisions. Setting refers to the time and place of a speech act and the physical circumstances; scene is the psychological setting or cultural definition, including formality and sense of play or seriousness. Speaker and audience include distinctions such as addressees and other hearers. Purposes, goals, and outcomes cover what the speaker intends.

Form and order of the event involve the sequence and structure of the discourse. Key refers to clues that establish the tone, manner, or spirit of the speech act. Forms and styles of speech include register and dialect features. The model was presented as a lighthearted heuristic to aid fieldworkers in documenting and analyzing instances of language use, which Hymes termed 'speech events.'

Embedded in the acronym is an application and extension of Roman Jakobson's arguments concerning the multifunctionality of language.

The "S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G" model

The SPEAKING acronym, described below, was presented as a lighthearted heuristic to aid fieldworkers in their attempt to document and analyze instances of language use, which he termed 'speech events'. Embedded in the acronym is an application and extension of Roman Jakobson's arguments concerning the multifunctionality of language. He articulated other, more technical, often typologically oriented approaches to variation in patterns of language use across speech communities in a series of articles.

Did You Know?

• Hymes earned his PhD in linguistics from Indiana University Bloomington in 1955, completing his dissertation—a grammar of the Kathlamet language—in just one year.
• He served as president of the American Folklore Society in 1973, the Linguistic Society of America in 1982, and the American Anthropological Association in 1983—the last person to have held all three positions.
• Hymes was accused of sexual harassment in the later years of his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, and as a result his portrait was removed from the Graduate School of Education in 2018.
• Hymes considered literary critic Kenneth Burke his biggest influence on his later work on poetics, saying, 'My sense of what I do probably owes more to KB than to anyone else.'