Ethnography of

communication
Pr. Maha El Biadi
the ethnography of speaking or more generally the ethnography of
communication, is concerned with the way language use in general is
related to social and cultural values.
According to Deborah Cameron(2001), it may be viewed as the
application of ethnographic methods to the communication patterns of
a group.
It is also considered to be a “qualitative” research method in the field
of communication in the sense that it may be used to study the
interactions among members of a specific culture/ speech community.
• Ethnography of Communication was originally referred to as
“Ethnography of Speaking” in Dell Hymes’ 1962 paper.

• It was later redefined in his 1964 paper titled “Introduction:Toward

Ethnographies of Communication” in order to accommodate the
verbal and non-verbal characteristics of communication.
• Most researchers working within this area tend to focus upon
speaking because it is considered to be the most prominent aspect of
communication.

• Ethnographers and anthropologists such as Hymes strongly believe

that ways of speaking can vary substantially from one culture to
another.
No gap no overlap rule
• Most middle class white Americans have a ‘no gap, no overlap’ rule
for conversational turn-taking.
• If two or more people engaged in conversation start to talk at the
same time, one will very quickly yield to the other so that the speech
of two people does not overlap.
• If on the other hand there is a lull in the conversation of more than a
few seconds the participants become extremely uncomfortable.
Someone will start talking about something unimportant to get rid of
what is considered an awkward silence.
Anthropology and linguistics

• For a long time ethnographers and linguists failed to account for an

interrelationship of language and culture.

• According to Hymes, both linguists and anthropologists were missing

a large and important area of human communication.
• Anthropologists had long conducted ethnographic
studies of different aspects of cultures- usually exotic
ones- such as kinship systems, or indigenous views of
medicine and curing.
• They are not concerned with the way language is and
how speakers go about using its structure.
• Language was treated as subsidiary ; as a way of
getting at these other topics.
• Linguists, on the other hand, were paying too much attention to
language as an abstract system.
• Linguists, in Hymes’ view, were paying too much attention to
language as an abstract system.
• They became interested in how to describe and explain the structures
of sentences that speakers of a certain language would accept as
grammatical.
• Issues relating to ‘how anybody used one of those
sentences – whether to show deference, to get
someone to do something, to display verbal skill, or to
give someone else information – was considered
simply outside the concerns of linguistic theory.’
(Fasold 1990: 39)

• ‘Linguists have abstracted from the content of speech,

social scientists from its form, and both from the
pattern of its use.’ (Hymes 1974: 126)
Language use in its social context

• The ethnography of communication would fill the gap by adding

another subject (speaking or communication) to the anthropologist’s
list of possible topics of ethnographic description, and expand
linguistics so that the study of the abstract structure of syntax,
phonology, and semantics would be only one component of
linguistics.

• According to Hymes, ‘a more complete linguistics would be concerned

with how speakers go about using these structures as well. (Fasold
1990: 40)
• Hymes, thus, called for an approach which would deal
with aspects of communication which were both
anthropological and linguistic.
• He launched a new discipline which he called the
ethnography of communication that would account
for the relationship between language and culture.
• His main aim is to describe and understand people’s
communicative behaviour in specific cultural settings
by looking at ‘the situations and uses, the patterns
and functions, of speaking as an activity in its own
right » (ibid)
• The priority which the ethnography of communication places on
modes and functions of language is a clear point of departure from
the priorities announced for linguistics by Chomsky:
“if we hope to understand human language and the
psychological capacities on which it rests, we must first ask what it is,
not how, or for what purpose it is used” (1968: 62).
•
• Hymes repeatedly emphasizes that what language is cannot be
separated from how and why it is used, and that considerations of
use are often prerequisite to recognition and understanding of much
of linguistic form.
• This is due to the premise or theory that the meaning of a particular
expression or speech can only be understood in relation to the
speech event or culture in which it is embedded.
• While recognizing the necessity to analyze the code itself and the
cognitive processes of its speakers and hearers, the ethnography of
communication takes language first and foremost as a socially
situated cultural form, which is indeed constitutive of much of culture
itself.

• In this field, communication is viewed as an uninterrupted flow of

information and not an exchange of disconnected, separate
messages.
• Communication / speech acts rather than specific languages serve as
the frame of reference for analyzing the place and function of
language in a particular society/culture.

• As a discipline partly based in Linguistics, the ethnography of commu

nication approaches language differently in contrast to linguistic
theories such as structuralism or transformational grammar.
Patterns of Communication

• It has long been recognized that much of linguistic behavior is rule-

governed i.e., it follows regular patterns and constraints which can be
formulated descriptively as rules.
• Hymes identifies concern for pattern as a key motivating factor in his
establishment of this discipline:
“My own purpose with the ethnography of speaking was . . . to
show that there was patterned regularity where it had been taken
to be absent, in the activity of speaking itself” (Hymes cited in
Saville-Troike 2003).
• Sociolinguists such as Labov (1963; 1966), Trudgill (1974), and Bailey
(1976) have demonstrated that what earlier linguists had considered
irregularity or “free variation” in linguistic behavior can be found to
show regular and predictable statistical patterns.
• Labov’s The Social Stratification of English in New York City was
concerned with a society whose linguistic behaviour is diverse. It
looked very chaotic and very hard to study that for some linguists it
seemed impossible to study it systematically.
Sociolinguistics and ethnography of communication
• Both are concerned with discovering regularities in language use:

• Sociolinguists typically focus on variability in pronunciation and grammatical

form.

• Ethnographers are concerned with how communicative units are organized

and how they pattern in a much broader sense of “ways of speaking,” as well
as with how these patterns interrelate in a systematic way with and derive
meaning from other aspects of culture.
• Communication patterns occur according to particular roles and
groups within a society, such as sex, age, social status, and
occupation: e.g., a teacher has different ways of speaking from a
lawyer, a doctor, or an insurance salesperson.
• Ways of speaking also pattern according to educational level, rural or
urban residence, geographic region, and other features of social
organization. (sociolinguistic variation)
Micro and macro sociolinguistics
1-Microsociolinguistics: A term sometimes used to cover the study of
face-to-face interaction, discourse analysis, conversational analysis and
other areas of sociolinguistics involving the study of relatively small
groups of speakers.

2- Macrosociolinguistics: A term sometimes used to cover secular

linguistics, the sociology of language, and other areas involving the
study of relatively large groups of speakers.
• Indeed, for some, pattern is culture:
“if we conceive culture as pattern that gives meaning to social acts and entities . . . we can
start to see precisely how social actors enact culture through patterned speaking and
patterned action” (Du Bois cited in Saville-Troike 2003).
Ritual use of language
• Ethnographers are interested in the ritual use of language because it
encodes cultural beliefs and reflects community social organization.
• Some common patterns are so regular, so predictable, that a very low
information load is carried even by a long utterance or interchange,
though the social meaning involved can be significant.
Greeting in Korean

• Greetings in some languages (e.g. Korean) may carry crucial

information identifying speaker relationships (or attitudes toward
relationships).
• An unmarked greeting sequence such as “Hello, how are you today?
Fine, how are you?” has virtually no referential content.
• A lengthy greeting sequence usually carries very low information
load when unmarked.
• Silence in response to another’s greeting in this sequence
would be marked communicative behavior, and would
carry a very high information load for speakers of English.
• Greetings in many languages are far more elaborate than
in English (e.g. Arabic, Indonesian, Igbo)
• A lengthy sequence may convey very little information as
long as it is unmarked.
• Silence in response to another’s greeting, because it is
marked in some cultures, would carry a very high
information load.
• Both can tell us a lot about the kind of relationship
between people involved in the interchange.
References
• Fasold, Ralph. 1990. Sociolinguistics of Language. Blackwell : Oxford
UK and Cambridge USA.
• Saville-Troike,Muriel. 2003. The Ethnography of Communication : An
Introduction. Blackwell Publishing