Ethnography of Communication

Abstract

Ethnography of communication (EC) is a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to the study of language and communication as actions that transpire in naturally occurring, everyday situations and interactions. The approach was conceived by Dell Hymes and colleagues in the 1960s and 1970s; it combines on the one hand, a richly descriptive ethnographic focus, with a detailed research procedure (Hymes' SPEAKING acronym) on the other hand. Hymes' SPEAKING acronym brings to the fore an array of components of communicative interaction, including participants, channels and media, sign systems, and more. In addition to the emphasis on communication as essential to sociocultural life, EC scholars typically focus on the unique cultural dimensions of communicative events and processes. EC advances a theoretical view whereby language and communication are essential social and cultural features, which allows smooth interchanges between studying the detail of actual situated interactions and the larger societal structures, relations, and identities that these interactions help to produce. EC is a productive approach to both research and theorizing, and it has inspired research in nearby fields, including linguistic anthropology, discourse studies, linguistic ethnography, interactional sociolinguistics, new literacy studies, and writing studies.