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Speech Codes Theory

Speech codes theory (SCT) expands on the ethnography of speaking (EOC) proposed by Dell Hymes by offering a communication-based analytic framework from which to understand cultural communication. Building on the idea that culture and communication are inextricably linked, SCT is designed to describe, explain, and predict cultural communication within the context of speech communities—that is, the theory is concerned with understanding how, in particular societies, community members perform, value, and evaluate their own and others' communication in their everyday lives. To orient how to conduct themselves and how to judge that conduct, community members use sets of social rules about how they should and should not communicate in particular contexts. Although these sets of rules are handed down from generation to generation, they are dynamic and can be tested, challenged, and modified.

Nature of Speech Codes Theory

SCT centers the role of communication as a means for discovering distinctive sets of precepts or rules for a given group or community about how life should be lived, how humans should interact with each other, and what penalties should be imposed when those rules are broken. The theory goes beyond simple description of speech codes, however; it seeks to answer questions about the existence of codes, their substance, the ways in which they can be discovered, and their communicative force or effect upon members of a community. By carefully and methodically attending to the things society members say, SCT helps respond to questions about personhood, sociality, morality, time, activity, place, nature, emotion, and spirituality, among other dimensions of living and being. More concretely, SCT helps provide answers to questions such as Who am I individually and with reference to a people? How should we be? How should we use time? How does place affect who and how we are? What is the role of nature in our lives? What do and should we feel about what is going on in our community? How does spirituality influence us?

Explicitly privileging the understanding of communication from the perspectives of those generating, enacting, and evaluating their own communication, SCT relies on fieldwork practices such as direct observation and interview that facilitate access to local viewpoints. From the ethnographic data these practices make available, theories about cultural communication can be developed.

Origins

SCT fundamentally is informed by the works of linguistic anthropologist Hymes and sociologist Basil Bernstein. SCT draws from Hymes's emphasis on the study of particular people's ways of communication and what meanings those ways of communication hold for them. Hymes's approach targets the identification and description of the particular units of discourse within which people jointly create the meanings that shape their everyday lives. It was Hymes's call for context-specific ethnographies of communication that prompted the many ethnographies that were used to develop the original version of SCT. In addition, SCT draws on Bernstein's concept of communication codes and the idea that people communicate according to principles or rules that govern what to say and how to say it in particular social contexts. Combining Hymes's idea of the means and meanings of communication and Bernstein's concept of codes, Gerry Philipsen formulated a definition of speech codes. As defined by Philipsen, speech codes are historically transmitted, socially constructed systems of symbols and meanings, premises and rules that pertain to communicative conduct. Codes, in other words, are systems or patterns of language use that are rich with sociocultural meanings for their users. Because the components of codes are inextricably woven into communication itself, the components (e.g., terms and phrases) comprise a structure of beliefs and values by which community members enact social life. Codes, then, comprise the observable or manifest social infrastructure guiding a people's communication practices and behaviors as well as the ideologies informing those behaviors.

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