Dell Hymes Quick Facts

Dell Hymes, an influential sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist.

Profile

• Birth Name: Dell Hathaway Hymes
• AKA: Dell Hymes; Dell H. Hymes
• Date of Birth: June 7, 1927
• Place of Birth: Portland, Oregon, USA
• Zodiac Sign: Gemini
• Date of Death: November 13, 2009
• Died at Age: 82
• Place of Death: Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
• Place of Burial: NA
• Cause of Death: Kidney failure & Alzheimer’s disease
• Ethnicity: White
• Nationality: American
• Father: Howard Hathaway
• Mother: Dorothy (née Bowman) Hymes
• Siblings:

1. Brother: Corwin Hymes

• Spouse:

1. Virginia (née Dosch) Wolff (m. 1954)

• Children:

1. Daughter- Vicky (Wolff) Unruh (by Virginia’s first marriage) (spouse: David)
2. Son - Robert Paul Wolff Hymes (by Virginia’s first marriage) (spouse: Debora Worth)
3. Daughter- Alison Bowman Hymes
4. Son- Kenneth Dell Hymes (spouse: Leisl Patton Hymes)

• Alma Mater: Reed College; Indiana University.
• Dell Hymes is known for: pioneering the connection between speech and human relations and human understandings of the world.
• Dell Hymes is criticized for: NA
• Dell Hymes was influenced by: Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Harry Hoijer, Roman Jakobson, Erving Goffman, Ray L. Birdwhistell, and Harold Garfinkel, Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson.
• Dell Hymes’s Works Inspired: Richard Bauman, Henry Glassie, and Lee Haring.
• Research Interests: Anthropology, Native American mythology, ethnopoetics.

Career History

• Hymes' first faculty position was at the Harvard University where he remained five years.
• In 1960, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley and served there for five years.
• Dr. Hymes joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1965 as professor of folklore and linguistics and of anthropology.
• From 1975 to 1987, he served as the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
• He left Pennsylvania in 1987 to serve on the faculty at the University of Virginia in both the anthropology and English departments. He retired from Pennsylvania in 1998 as an emeritus professor.

Quotes

"We have then to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others. This competence, moreover, is integral with attitudes, values, and motivations concerning language, its features and uses, and integral with competence for, and attitudes toward, the interrelation of language with the other code of communicative conduct."- Dell Hymes, “On communicative competence”

“The specification of ability for use as part of competence allows for the role of non cognitive factors, such as motivation, as partly determining competence. In speaking of competence, it is especially important not to separate cognitive from affective and volitive factors, so far as the impact of the theory on educational practice is concerned; but also with regard to speech design and explanation” - Dell Hymes, “On communicative competence”

"The concept of performance will take on great importance, in so far as the study of communicative competence is seen as an aspect of what from another angle may be called the ethnography of symbolic forms, the study of the variety of genres, narration, dance, drama, song, instrumental music, visual art, that interrelate with speech in the communicative life of a society and in terms of which the relative importance and meaning of speech and language must be assessed - Dell Hymes, “On communicative competence”

Major Works

Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology (1964)
"In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (1981)
Reinventing anthropology (1972)
Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice (1996)
Now I Know Only So Far (2003)
American Structuralism (1975)
Breakthrough Into Performance (1973)
Essays in the History of Linguistic Anthropology (1983)
Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays (1980)
The use of computers in anthropology (1965)
On Noam Chomsky: Critical Essays (1974)
Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach (1974)

Did You Know?

• Between 1944 to 1945 Hymes attended public schools in Oregon.
• After one year of his enrollment at Reed College, Hymes joined the army and served two years as clerk in South Korea during the World War II.
• After the war he returned to Reed in 1947 and studied under legendary anthropology professor David French and his wife Kay Story French.
• In 1950, Hymes earned his bachelor’s degree in literature and anthropology from Reed College.
• He earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from Indiana University in 1955.
• He coined the term “Communicative competence” in reaction to Noam Chomsky’s (1965) concept of “linguistic competence”.
• He postulated the SPEAKING Model.
• He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics".
• He served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1982, of the American Anthropological Association in 1983, and of the American Folklore Society.
• In 1972, Hymes founded the journal Language in Society and served as its editor for 22 years.
• In 2006, he was awarded the Gold Medal of Philology.
• Hymes’ first marriage was a failure and ended in divorce.
• He got married for the second time in 1954 to Virginia Dosch Wolff.
• Hymes and Virginia were married for 55 years until his death in 2009.
• Hymes adopted Virginia’s two children by her first marriage.
• His wife, Virginia Hymes, was also a sociolinguist and folklorist.
• Like Hymes, Virginia went on to work for more than half a century on Native American cultures and languages.
• It is alleged that during his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania he was involved in sexually harassing a number of women.
• In 1981, Hymes published his seminal work, 'In Vain I Tried to Tell You': Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics.
• Hymes is best known for his pioneering work in ethnopoetics.

Photographs

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