Literature Review
Ethnography and Ethnography of Communication
The Ethnography of Communication is being proposed by a well-known scholar, Dell Hymes. Ethnography is the description of the human culture and communication is the ways of expressing ideas, thoughts, intentions and feelings. Dell Hymes took the initiatives to combine both concepts together thus it became “Ethnography of Communication” which defined as the study of communication in its widest cultural and social context, including rules of language, norms of appropriate language use in particular settings, and evaluations given by members of a culture to various speech styles.
What is speech community?
The notion of speech community has always been the central one in linguistic investigation. Its definition is always not the satisfactory if every anthropologists. Therefore, it is crucial to take some definition of speech community by other famous scholars, such as Dell Hymes and John Lyons. The definition of speech community by John Lynos (1970) cited in the Journal article “Speech Community and SLA” (Zhan, 2013) is “Given language or dialects are using by a group of people”. The definition is rather simple and inadequate to support the notion of ethnography of communication. The definition given by John Lyons was focusing on a given language and dialect. It makes no allowance for bilingual or bi- dialectal communities. According to Dell Hymes (2011), he stressed that a speech community is a community that