Dell Hymes | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 7, 1927 |
| Died | November 13, 2009 (aged 82) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Indiana University Bloomington (PhD), Reed College |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University |
| Notable students | Regna Darnell, Richard Bauman |
Dell Hathaway Hymes (June 7, 1927, in Portland, Oregon – November 13, 2009, in Charlottesville, Virginia) was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline (linguistics). In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society and served as its editor for 22 years.[1]