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Ethnography of Speaking
The Ethnography of Speaking (EoS), also known as the Ethnography of Communication, is one of the first clearly articulated frameworks to approach the question of intercultural discourse and communication. Dell Hymes is recognized as the originator of this field, based on a series of writings beginning in 1962 (for example, Hymes 1962, 1964, 1972, 1974). In this chapter, I outline the basics of the original Hymesian EoS approach and its significance, and then discuss some studies that take the general EoS view but elaborate on methods or theory. I then compare two examples of EoS analysis in order to show how such a comparison can be profitable for studies of intercultural discourse and communication.
Hymes’s work arose in an intellectual climate with two important currents of thought, although undoubtedly they are not the only ones. The first was Chomsky’s generative grammar program (originating with Chomsky 1957 and 1964), and second was the emergence, and deep discussion, of methods for description in anthropology, and the structuralist focus of the time (Lévi-Strauss 1963). Hymes outlined two main goals for his program, a descriptive and a theoretical. The descriptive goal was to develop a framework with two purposes. First, the framework should reflect the ways in which native speakers understand interaction within their cultures. This is an “emic” description, similar to the “phonemic” descriptions made for sound systems of languages. ...
