Ethnography of Communication as a Research Perspective

The ethnography of communication offers qualitative researchers a methodology for studying the complex interrelationship between language and sociocultural context within the lifeworld of a particular social group. Originating in the work of linguistic anthropologist and sociologist Dell Hymes, the ethnography of communication allows a researcher to study the distinctive configuration of discursive conventions, possibilities, and constraints—that is, the “ways of speaking”—that structure the communicative activities and interactions of any given social group. An approach combining ethnography, the description and analysis of culture, with linguistics, the description and analysis of language, the ethnography of communication centers on the concept of the “speech community”—a group of people sharing a linguistic code as well as norms of discursive interaction, expression, and interpretation. In the decades since Hymes conceived the ethnography of communication, researchers in the same tradition, most notably Muriel Saville‐Troike, have used the methodology to describe and explain the ways of speaking of many different speech communities over a wide geographical range, while also contributing concepts and theories to a larger meta‐understanding of communicative patterns across human cultures.