On Hymes: introduction

Abstract

Dell Hymes became a scholar in the aftermath of the Second World War, as an e¤ect of the GI Bill that o¤ered access to higher education to veterans. His career spans the whole of the second half of the twentieth century, and his impact has been monumental. He was involved, usually in a leading capacity, in almost all the post-war developments in the study of language in society. Most importantly, and in close interaction with a generation comprising the likes of Gumperz, Garfinkel, Cicourel, and Go¤man, he was instrumental in carving out a space for a study of language that escaped the dominance of the Chomskyan paradigm. While he himself would insist that this space was an ethnographic space, the labels under which he also sought accommodation included sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, folklore, and applied linguistics. Hymes was president of professional bodies in all of these fields: of the Linguistic Association of America, the American Anthropological Association, the American Folklore Society, and the American Association for Applied Linguistics. He founded and edited journals as well: Language in Society still stands as one of the world’s leading journals in the field he helped carve out. He saw this study of language in society as an ever-expanding field and, consequently, he let his influence be felt in many new or reformed disciplines of social-scientific study in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a scholar in power (in many senses of the term), someone whose scholarship always accompanied his politics of advocacy, programmatic (and relevance-focused) research and research programming. Almost all of the papers in this volume identify this close connection and comment on it: it is an aspect of Hymes’s work which is often overlooked and which, if paid attention to, can point researchers now toward wellformulated questions of relevance in sociolinguistic work. In formulating such questions, Hymes had his two feet firmly planted in an older American anthropological tradition—which he documented and discussed in numerous publications—but complemented with an exceptionally broad theoretical and empirical outlook (the theoretical range of which he often