Ethnography of communication

An approach to studying how people communicate within cultural settings, including how speech, silence, genres, and interaction rules acquire meaning.

Dell Hymes: An American linguist and anthropologist who developed the ethnography of communication and the SPEAKING framework. His framework gives this approach its best-known analytic vocabulary.
Participant observation: A research method in which investigators take part in social life while observing it. It reveals communication practices in the settings where they naturally occur.
Boasian anthropology: An anthropological tradition associated with Franz Boas that emphasizes cultural particularity and empirical study. Its attention to cultural context helped shape the approach’s view of language.
Speech codes theory: A theory that explains how culturally distinctive systems of communication shape meaning and conduct. It applies ethnographic analysis to the rules and premises behind communicative styles.
Communicative competence: The knowledge needed to communicate appropriately and effectively in a language community. The approach examines the culturally learned abilities behind successful interaction.
Ethnographic interview: An open-ended interview designed to elicit people’s experiences and cultural understandings in context. Interviews help explain local meanings that observation alone may not reveal.
Franz Boas: A German-American anthropologist whose work challenged racial determinism and advanced historical particularism. His insistence on studying cultures on their own terms informed later linguistic anthropology.
Communicative ecology: The interconnected communication practices, media, and relationships in a community or setting. The approach can map how local communication practices interact across settings and media.
Speech community: A group whose members share norms and expectations for language use. Shared communication norms define the cultural setting under study.
Interactional sociolinguistics: An approach that studies how people use linguistic and contextual cues to interpret interaction. It offers detailed tools for tracing how participants infer meaning in real time.

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