By

Nanthini a/p Suppiah

Nurshahirah binti Abd Aziz
  Introduced by Dell Hymes in 1962
 ‘Ethnography of communication’ means the different
features of an approach that is taken towards
understanding a language from an anthropological
perspective.
 Originally termed as ‘ethnography of speaking’
 Hymes broadened it in 1964 to include the non-vocal
and non-verbal aspects of communication.

 Purpose
Ethnography of
Communication  Ethnography of communication has two main
purposes, according to Hymes:
Theory
 1. “To investigate directly the use of language in
contexts of situations so as to discern patterns
proper to speech activity”
 2. “To take as framework a community, exploring
its unrestrained habits as a whole”

 ‘Introduction: Toward Ethnographies of

Communications’ (1964)
 • Linguistics behaviour is rule-governed
• Sociolinguists focus on variability in
pronunciation and grammatical form,
Patterns of whereas ethnographers concerned
Communication about organization of communicative
unit and their patterns (interrelate and
derive meaning from various aspects of
cultures)
 • Patterns in terms of; functions, categories
of talk, attitudes, conceptions about
language and speakers, roles and groups
within society.

Patterns of • It is also patterning according to specific

roles and groups within society; age, sex,
Communication social status and occupation.
in Societal Level E.g. : A teacher has different ways of speaking from a
lawyer, a doctor or an insurance salesman.
(looking at the tone, the choice of words used)

• Educational level, residential area (rural or

urban), geographic region and other
features of social organization also play a
major role in patterning communication.
 • Example A
Opening sequence of a telephone conversation
- Ring of the telephone (summons)
- The person who answers must speak first even when the caller
Patterns of knows that the phone has been picked up.
- If nobody says anything, the caller cannot proceed.
Communication
• Example B
in Group Level Asking someone if he/she has a pen; shows a request to borrow the
pen afterwards rather than act as a truth value question.
- If one does not offer (if they have a pen), it shows that they are
rude.
• Analyse and understand one’s expression and personality.
• Culture and belief play vital role in patterning
communication (i.e some societies can be very blunt, some
more straightforward whereas some can be very soft-
spoken

• Example A
The increase in volume when speaking / talking; brings
different meaning to different people.
- Some people may view it as anger while some may consider
it as the normal tone.

Patterns of Communication
in Individual Level
Communicative
Functions
• Language serves many functions; political goals,
functioning to create / reinforce boundaries in
order to unify speakers.
• Also serves as social identification function within
society through linguistics indicators.
- reinforce social stratification
- maintain power relationships between groups

Example: Malaysians who use English language as the

first language are considered more superior than
those who are not.
Speech Community

• The main focus is to look at the way

communication is patterned and organized
within that unit.
• Criteria of speech community;
- Shared; language use, rules of speaking,
interpretation of speech performance,
attitudes and values, sociocultural
understandings
 Involves not only
knowing the language
Communicative code but also ‘what
to say and to whom
Involves the social
and cultural
Competence and how to say it knowledge speakers
appropriately in any
given situation.
 In a diverse community, being able to sound appropriately
‘incompetent’ in a language when a situation dictates is
considered as part of communicative competence.

The Carried out to signal deference when communicating with

someone of high rank.
Competence
of
Incompetence
Second language speakers are often advised not to try to
sound to much like a native speakers. This may lead to
resentment from native speakers if they do not welcome
new members or feelings from the primary speech
community that one is being disloyal to it.
 UNITS OF ANALYSIS
• Describe and analyse communication
• Situation, event, and act (Hymes, 1972)
What?

• Context within which communication occurs.

• Examples include a religious service, a court trial, a holiday party, an auction, a train ride, or a class in school.
Communicative • The place of conversation doesn’t matter and can be used for different communicative situations. E.g. religious places
situation?

• Unified set of components throughout, beginning with the same general purpose of communication, general topic, participants, language
variety, tone or key and rules for interaction, in the same setting
• An event terminates whenever there is a change in the major participants, their role-relationships, or the focus of attention - discontinuous
Communicative events are possible E.G. Interrogation during a party event
event? • Discovering what constitutes a communicative event and what classes of events are recognized within a speech community are a fundamental
part of doing ethnography of communication

• Single interactional function, such as a referential statement, a request, or a command, and may be either verbal or
nonverbal.
• Silence may be an intentional and conventional communicative act, and used to question, promise, deny, warn, insult,
Communicative request, or command (Saville-Troike 1985)
act? • E.g. facial expression and body language conveys meaning (raising eyebrow, using fillers in speech conveys supporting
details of the communication)
• In this research, analysis at the level of the communicative act
made it possible to determine the relative frequency of different
communicative functions for students in different events and
across time
• E.g., warnings and threats to other students declined
significantly, and requests for clarification increased
• Compare the linguistic form that was selected within events
across time for each type of act (e.g. from gestures and
nonspeech sounds used for warnings and threats at the
beginning of the year, to holistic routines, to increasing syntactic
complexity in English).
 Labels Categories of Talk
Provide a useful clue to
what categories it recognizes
and considers salient

Ethnosemantics
Provide clues to how other
dimensions of the society are (also called ethnolinguistics,
segmented and organized. ethnoscience, ethnographic
semantics, and new
ethnography)

Have different functional

distributions, limited to a
situation, or involve constraints
on who may speak them, or what
topic may be addressed.
Example

– Frake (1969) provides an excellent example in his study of the Philippine Yakan.
– Their native categories of talk elicited in this manner include mitin ‘discussion,’
qisun ‘conference,’ mawpakkat ‘negotiation,’ and kukum ‘litigation.’
– Frake then analyzes each of these categories in terms of their distinctive
communicative features, which in this case contrast on the dimensions of focus,
purpose, roles, and integrity (the extent to which the activity is perceived as an
integral unit).
 Language and Culture
Analysis of communication within
specific speech communities.
Evolution of culture is dependent on
the capacity of humans to use language
for purposes of organizing social
cooperation.
Correlation between the form and
content of a language and the beliefs,
values, and needs present in the
culture of its speakers.
Vocabulary of a language - a catalogue
of things considered important to the
society, an index to the way speakers
categorize experience, and often a
record of past contacts and cultural
borrowings
Directness or indirectness (cultural
themes) Indirectness – use of Metaphors and
E.g. Asian going hungry in US for the use proverbs (criticism)
of ‘no’
E.g. APACHE theme of male superiority
Indirectness - Grammatical code, using
&
passive rather than active voice, or using
Manus of new guinea anti-sex theme – impersonal pronouns
no words for ‘love’
Interrelationship of patterns in various
aspects of culture is pervasive enough in
many cases for us to call them themes, or
central organizing principles which control
behavior
The grammar may reveal the way time is
segmented and organized, beliefs about
animacy and the relative power of beings,
and salient social categories in the culture
 Social
Structure and
Ideology

Political Social
Social change Social system
influence organization

Change in language Change of address Language markers Learning “good”

use caused by terminology among help perpetuate English will
changing ideologies mandarin Chinese inequalities automatically erase
speakers in mainland class boundaries and
Banning of the China and in Taiwan Calling all doctors he prejudice.
Bavarian greeting and all nurses she
grüss gott during Use of tongzhi perpetuates
Hitler’s reign in ‘comrade’ largely occupational
Germany. replaced professional inequality between
titles, nu tongzhi and men and women by
nan tongzhi influencing thought
and perception.
Universals Inequalities

Universal framework of Not all languages are equally

conversational maxims capable of serving the same
functions in a society.

Speakers of Malagasy regularly All languages are adequate as

violate the maxim to “be communicative systems for members of a
informative’’ (lying) social group, but it will be accepted by most
administrators concerned with education
and economics in developing countries

Some aspects of language

function will prove to be universal
Respect to the degree to which
individual speakers are competent
in the language(s) of their group.
Multilingual societies, different
languages often serve differential
functions
 Research on Ethnography of
Communication

1)
Multicultural Communication Competence and Education in Ethnic Minority Areas
of Yunnan

Hao Li
2018
 Cultural diversity is evident throughout schools in border provinces of China,
especially in Yunnan, which has the largest number of ethnic minorities. To what
extent do teachers in Yunnan prepare their teaching to cater for the needs of
culturally and linguistically diverse students? Findings revealed that cultural and
communicative barriers exist in Yunnan's schools, resulting in the academic
underachievement of minority students. This paper integrates some external
issues, such as the insufficient family education and a lack of support and
understanding from schools, with internal problems, such as students' and

Abstract teachers' scant knowledge in multicultural communication and the stress from
psychological and behavioral adjustment during the acculturation process, into
a summary as multicultural communicative and educational problems. To solve
these problems, theories and practice of multicultural communication
competence are introduced to meet the varied needs of students in the
multicultural environment and integrate teachers with theoretical approaches
for multicultural communication education. School courses need to be updated
to address the needs of students from different cultural backgrounds, and this
paper also provides practical ways to begin with.
 2)
The Effects of Verbal and Nonverbal Elements in Persuasive
Communication — Findings from Two Multi-Method Experiments

Nikolaus Jackob
Thomas Roessing
Thomas Ernst Petersen
2011
 This article addresses the relationship between content, voice, and body language in persuasive

communication and the contribution of these three elements of persuasive performances to its overall

persuasiveness. Findings are presented from two separate laboratory experiments. In the first experiment

three versions of a video displaying a speech were shown to three different groups of participants: (1)

without vocal emphasis and without gestures of the speaker, (2) with vocal emphasis but without gestures,

(3) with vocal emphasis and gestures. Audio tracks of the first two experimental conditions were later

used in the second experiment to analyze the effects of vocal emphasis when no visual cues are present.

Measurement included a questionnaire as well as real time response-measurement (RTR). It was found that

content dominates the effect of the speech; emphasis and gestures, however, improved the perception of

some features of the speech, such as liveliness and power. Audio-only versions yielded similar results but
ABSTRACT were rated more favorably in general.
 3)

McDonald's Success Strategy And Global Expansion

Through Customer And Brand Loyalty

• Bahaudin G. Mujtaba & Bina Patel

2007
 The McDonald’s Corporation is one of the most
successful global restaurant chains around the world.
They have used effective management and global
expansion strategies to enter new markets and gain a
share of the foreign fast food market. This case
presents how McDonald’s has achieved this enormous
success, its best practices in the global food industry,
international growth trends and challenges, and
various lessons that have been learned from their ABSTRACT
expansion in foreign countries. Overall, the case
provides a discussion of how McDonald’s creates both
customer and brand loyalty for their products and
services. This case focuses on McDonald’s
international success, challenges and strategies.