Abstract

This article reviews Dell Hymes's formative impact on the study of speech socialization. From the early 1960s on, Hymes addressed issues of language socialization, partly in response to the limitations in Chomsky's powerful theoretical interventions on child language, and partly as an extension of a maturing ethnographic paradigm. Focusing on speech in culture-related behavioral settings, Hymes developed a paradigm that revolved around function and context. While this topic was initially part of the general ethnographic program in Hymes's work, it gave rise to a period of productive research on culture-specific patterns of child language use, the structure of speech repertoires, and functions of speech in socialization, which empirically realized the perspective in Hymes's theoretical discussions.