Dell Hymes

Dell Hathaway Hymes (June 7, 1927 in Portland, Oregon – November 13, 2009 in Charlottesville, Virginia) was a linguist, a sociolinguist who developed a theory based on the social aspects involved in the language process.

Dell Hymes’ theory was related to pragmatics (the study of the social rules of communication). Hymes coined the term “Communicative Competence” in 1966 in contrast to Chomsky´s theory “Linguistic Competence” that was published in 1995.

Communicative Competence is based in the sociocultural aspects involved in a language. According to this theory to understand and to communicate properly in a language is necessary more than linguistics knowledge (vocabulary, grammar, syntax, phonetics, etc.), it is also necessary to know how to use all that knowledge in a specific context.

The main tenets of this theory are:

• Language is a relationship between linguistics and social aspects.

• Language belongs to humans and humans need social contact for communicate.

• Language belongs to a specific time and a specific place.

• The study of language cannot be divided, because language is a complex system that requires the linguistic and the communicative competence.

• To communicate is necessary knowledge about what to say, where, when, and to whom say something. It is necessary not only linguistic knowledge but also sociocultural knowledge to use the language.

What is the contribution of this theory?

Understand the language is something that all linguist has in common, because of that they study different aspects of this system. Some of them pay more attention to one area than others, but the thing is that they create theories that helps and contributes a lot when someone wants to investigate about this topics.

The communicative competence theory helps us to understand how language works in society and how language changes depend of the culture. We realize that language is a reciprocal process, and that the interaction needed to communicate something it is only possible in a context.

Can we see this theory reflected in our Language Acquisition Process?

When we acquire a language we noticed that there are a lot of things that we have to know. It is necessary to learn vocabulary, grammatical structures, and most of this knowledge is acquired in a classroom or in an academic field. However to develop a good fluency in the language we are learning it is also necessary to learn about the culture. We need to learn things that we can only learn in the context. For example we can achieved a good level of linguistic competence in English, but if we traveled to London, without learn basic things about the culture and the dialect spoken there like (idioms, slang, etc.)  We will not be able to understand their daily conversations.

There is a clear example in the idiom “it is raining cats and dogs”, we can say linguistically speaking, that we know the meaning of all the words in this sentence, but if we do not know the contextual meaning of this sentence we will not be able to understand the idiom.

We can imagine literally with this sentence that it is raining animals from the sky, but when we understand the contextual meaning of the sentence we can get the real meaning of the idiom which is that “It was rainy strong”.

So, it is noticeable that we can observe in our language acquisition process many of the aspects describes in the theories related to linguistics.