Dell Hymes

Dell Hathaway Hymes (1927–2009) was an American sociolinguist, linguistic anthropologist, and folklorist who founded the ethnography of communication and gave language education the term that most powerfully reshaped it: communicative competence. He taught at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia, where he was University Professor.

Hymes's 1972 paper "On Communicative Competence" argued that Chomsky's grammatical competence was too thin a model of what speakers actually know. A speaker needs to know not only whether a sentence is formally possible but whether it is feasible, appropriate, and actually performed in a community. That single move provided the theoretical foundation on which Communicative Language Teaching, Canale & Swain's models, and most subsequent frameworks of language ability were built.

Career

• PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University (1955)
• Faculty at Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania (where he became Dean of the Graduate School of Education), and the University of Virginia
• Past president of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Anthropological Association, and the American Folklore Society

Published Work

• "On Communicative Competence" (1972) — the foundational essay for CLT
• Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach (1974)
• Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality (1996)
• "Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life" (1972)

Influence

• Provided the theoretical charter for communicative language teaching
• Founded the ethnography of communication as a research tradition
• Remains a reference point for any serious discussion of what language ability consists of