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To quote Dell Hymes: "The starting point is the ethnographic analysis of the
communicative conduct of a community" (1974: 9). Studying behavior within one’s own or
another culture is limited if it ignores a critical aspect of behavior – namely, speech – just as
studying language is limited if it ignores the cultural contexts in which language is produced.

Scope and Focus
As with any other science, the Ethnography of Communication has two foci:
1) particularistic: is directed towards the description and understanding of communicative
behaviour in specific cultural settings
2) generalizing: is directed towards the formulation of concepts and theories upon which to
build a global metatheory of human communication.

The topic question is:
What does a speaker need to know to communicate appropriately within a particular
speech community, and how does he or she learn?
Such knowledge, together with whatever skills are needed to make use of it, is:
Communicative Competence

Methods of the Ethnography of Communication
“Doing ethnography” in another culture involves first and foremost field work,
including observing, asking questions, participating in group activities, and testing the
validity of one’s perceptions against the intuitions of natives.
Ethnography by no means requires investigating only “others”: one’s own speech
community may be profitably studied as well.

The goals and tasks
The goal of ethnography of communication is to study the communicative competence
of a specific speech community by discovering and analyzing patterns of communication that
organize the use of language in particular communicative activities.
The aim of the ethnography of communication is:
• to explore the means of speaking available to members of a particular community;
• to examine formal, informal and ritual events within a particular group of speakers;
• to explore language use in particular social and cultural settings, drawing together both
anthropological and linguistic views on communication;
• to examine the varieties of language used within the community as well as the speech
acts and genres available to the members of the community.
The task of Ethnography is seen as the discovery and explication of the rules for
contextually appropriate behaviour in a community or group.

Significance of the Ethnography of Communication

For Antrophology:
The Ethnography of Communication extends understandings of cultural systems to
language, relating language to:
• social organisation;
• role-relationship;
• values and beliefs;