ABSTRACT
When Dell Hymes wrote these words, they were aimed at countering the dominant Chompskyan linguistics of the time, which, by emphasizing the generic potentiality of human language, depreciated, in Hymes’s view, “the actuality of language” (1980a, p. 20). In contrast, Hymes offered a “differently based notion,” which, he said, “I shall call ways of speaking” (1980a, p. 20). Only by shifting our gaze from language per se to the role of language in living, breathing speech communities, Hymes insisted, can we transcend “a liberal humanism which merely recognizes the abstract potentiality of all languages, to a humanism which can deal with . . . the inequalities that actually obtain, and help to transform them through knowledge of the ways in which language is actually organized as a human problem and resource” (1980a, pp. 55-56; emphases added). Although Hymes penned his essay on the origins of linguistic inequality almost four decades ago, his words continue to teach us about “new directions” in the study of language planning and policy. The seminal critical ethnographer, Hymes found within ethnography not only the methodological tools for understanding diverse ways of speaking, but also an engine for social change. What ethnographers do, he argued – “learn the meanings, norms, and patterns of a way of life” – is precisely what humans do every day; ethnography is “continuous with ordinary life [and] the knowledge that others already have” (1980b, p. 98). Thus, ethnography contains within it the seeds of transformation whereby hierarchies between the “knower” and the “known” can be dissolved; ethnography is, Hymes stressed, a particularly appropriate form of inquiry for a democratic society (1980b, p. 99). We frame this chapter as a dialogic engagement with Hymes’s early work – his calls for a different way of looking at language that can be fruitfully applied to language policy – and his emphasis on ethnography as both a “way of seeing” (Wolcott, 2008) and a critically conscious, democratizing way of knowing. We ground our analysis in two data sets: a long-term, multi-sited ethnographic study of Native American youth language practices and ideologies in settings
undergoing rapid language shift (McCarty, Romero-Little, & Zepeda, 2006; McCarty et al., 2009a, 2009b), and a smaller-scale study led by McCarty at a multilingual, multicultural school.2
