A bibliography of fieldwork in the ethnography of communication

In 1962, Dell Hymes proposed the project he subsequently named the ethnography of communication (Hymes 1961, 1962, 1964b ). Its central motive was to create a theory of linguistic communication which is grounded in the comparative analysis of many communities and their distinctive ways of speaking. Just as there is a comparative politics, law, religion, and so forth, he said, so should there be a comparative analysis of “studies ethnographic in basis and communicative in scope” (Hymes 1964b :9). Such studies would be “whole ethnographies focused on communicative behavior” ( 1964b :9) and would be guided by, and subsequently used to guide the revision of, a descriptive framework which itself is a model of sociolinguistic description.