Hymes Ethnography
In 1964 Gumperz and Hymes edited a special issue of the ‘American Anthropologist’ which they entitled
“The ethnography of communication “. In this study contented with the article by several brilliant scholars
in the discipline of Anthropology, Sociology, Linguistics and psychology who contributed or addressed
themselves to the issue in the context of verbal communication (Chienjer Charls Lin,jun10, 2004). The
original publication had been revised, updated and expanded into ‘Directions in sociolinguistics: the
ethnography of communication’ (1986). Hymes was inspired by Noam Chomsky’s (1965) ‘Theory of
Linguistic competence and performance’. Chomsky said, primarily the language of an ideal speaker-hearer
in a completely homogenous speech community who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by
grammatically irreverent conditions, like as memory imitations, directions, shifts of attention and interest,
and errors (random or characteristics) in applying his knowledge of language in actual performance.