The conventions which order speech interaction are meaningful not only in that they order and mediate verbal expression, but in that they participate in and express larger meanings in the society which uses them. This paper attempts a look at a particular structure of conventions and associated meanings in Antigua, West Indies.

George Lamming, the West Indian writer, opens his book The Pleasures of Exile with a quotation from Shakespeare's The Tempest – a play which he discusses at length in the book as a symbol of the cultural relations of the metropolitan countries with their Caribbean colonies:

The word ‘noise’ has unfamiliar meanings here – and the ambiguities that result may serve us, as I feel they often do West Indians, to characterize and to symbolize both the structure and the ambivalent value of certain central patterns of West Indian speech.

Lamming himself is aware of these ambiguities. Of a West Indian politician in England he remarks, ‘He would shout his replies when the devil's disciples came to heckle. And that is as it should be; for there is no voice which can make more noise in argument than the West Indian voice’ (1960:91). And of himself, ‘So I made a heaven of a noise which is characteristic of my voice and an ingredient of West Indian behaviour’ (1960:62).

A community's system of speech situations and events constitutes the structural matrix within which speaking occurs in that community. Giving shape to these scenes as they are enacted, and underlying the dynamics of communicative activity within them, are sets of general cultural themes and social-interactional organizing principles, which may be seen from the point of view of the ethnography of speaking as the implicit or explicit community ground rules for performance. Such ground rules are only analytically separable from the speech activities themselves, and most of the papers in this volume contain information about organizing principles of this kind. The papers in this section, however, are distinguished by their principal focus on this aspect of the speech economy of particular communities (for speech economy, see Hymes, section VI).

The analysis of community ground rules for performance may serve a particularly important function for the ethnography of speaking in that such ground rules, by the generalness of their scope, often represent the means for establishing the continuity between speaking and other forms of expressive behavior. Speech activity does not necessarily constitute a discrete domain within cultures, and the analysis of general social and cultural principles governing speaking may show these to cut across a range of activities and govern other kinds of behavior besides speaking, in a way that the study of specifically speech acts, situations, and events cannot.

A basic element of an ethnography of speaking is the description of the speech community and its linguistic resources. Investigators are continually struck by the diversity of linguistic means in use in communities and the concomitant ability of members of the communities to communicate with one another nevertheless.

Every society makes available to its members a repertoire of linguistic alternatives or resources which they draw on (in an ecological sense) for both referential and stylistic purposes (see paper by Hymes in section VI). The nature of the communicatively meaningful contrasts within the ‘sociolinguistic’ repertoire varies dramatically from society to society. It might involve slight differences in the pronunciation of single sounds that must be described in terms of statistical tendencies. Thus Labov (1966) studies the social implications of the variable pronunciations of the sounds /th/, /dh/, and /r/, among others, in New York City. Gillian Sankoff here discusses the pronunication of the variable /l/ in Montreal French; speakers have available to them the choice of pronouncing this variable as either [l] or ø. This choice depends on both linguistic and social contexts of usage.

A society's linguistic resources might, on the other hand, consist of a complex of related dialects. Thus, James Fox shows that on the island of Roti, individuals speak the particular dialect of their nusak ‘native domain’ in everyday, colloquial speech, but draw on other Rotinese dialects for the formation of formal, ritual speech.

In the Vaupés territory of southeastern Colombia are over twenty exogamous patrilineal descent units, each of which is identified with a distinct language. In the literature on the Vaupés, these units have always been called ‘tribes.’ Although no single generally accepted definition of tribe exists, those most frequently offered in the literature are concerned with the presence of factors such as (1) tribal territory; (2) political, ceremonial, or warrior roles as tribesmen; (3) more intra-tribal as opposed to intertribal interaction; (4) some proportion of marriages occurring within the tribal unit; and (5) some cultural differences between neighboring tribes. None of the definitions utilizing these factors permits calling the Vaupés units tribes; at present these units mainly function as marriage classes, even though they are each identified with different languages. Hence, thinking of them as tribes is misleading and in this paper they are called ‘language-aggregates.’

This paper is concerned with the role language plays in the Vaupés as a symbol of membership in a language-aggregate, and with the relationship between language and Vaupés social structure. The first section gives a brief ethnographic introduction and description of Vaupés multilingualism. The second section analyzes Vaupés languages as emblems of the language-aggregates and as badges of identity for individual Indians. Finally, some ways in which the Vaupés data apply to some of the current issues on sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking are suggested.

For a Rotinese, the pleasure of life is talk – not simply an idle chatter that passes time, but the more formal taking of sides in endless dispute, argument, and repartee or the rivaling of one another in eloquent and balanced phrases on ceremonial occasions. Speeches, sermons, and rhetorical statements are a delight. But in this class society, with hierarchies of order, there are notable constraints on speech. In gatherings, nobles speak more than commoners, men more than women, elders more than juniors; yet commoners, women, and youth, when given the opportunity as they invariably are, display the same prodigious verbal prowess. Lack of talk is an indication of distress. Rotinese repeatedly explain that if their ‘hearts’ are confused or dejected, they keep silent. Contrarily, to be involved with someone requires active verbal encounter and this often leads to a form of litigation that is conducted more, it would seem, for the sake of argument than for any possible gain.

Three hundred years of Dutch records for the island provide an apt chronicle of this attitude toward speaking. The Dutch East India Company annual reports for Timor in the eighteenth century are crammed with accounts of the shifting squabbles of related Rotinese rulers. By the twentieth century, the colonial service had informally established Roti as a testing ground. If a young administrator could weather the storms of the litigious Rotinese, he was due for promotion.

One of the most central concerns of the ethnography of speaking is the description of speech acts, events, and situations. All of the papers in the book deal with it in some way, but for the papers in this section it is the primary focus of attention.

Most formal description within linguistics has been limited to units of sentence length. With this limitation, insights have been achieved in the techniques and theory of linguistic formalization. Yet there is much more to language use than abstract, isolated sentences; and such uses of language as greetings, leave-takings, conversations, speeches, stories, insults, jokes, and puns also have a formal structure. The papers in this section by Judith Irvine and Anne Salmond are examples of the kinds of formal descriptions that can be written for discourse. Irvine provides a grammar of Wolof greetings; Salmond, of an entire Maori speech situation, the ritual of encounter. Rules which formally describe speech acts, events, and situations must include aspects of language and speech which have usually been ignored in traditional grammatical descriptions. Most obvious is perhaps the participants in the event. The grammatical descriptions by Irvine and Salmond are written not from the perspective of a single, isolated, abstract individual, but rather from that of all of the participants in the event. The participants in the Wolof greeting, and especially their social ranking with respect to one another, are incorporated into the greeting rules.

The principle of social inequality is fundamental to the organization of social life among the Wolof. On the broadest level, it is expressed in the division of society into hierarchically ranked status groups, or castes. But it governs more than the arrangement of large groups. It is essential to all social interaction, even the most minute. This paper will examine the principle of inequality at work on the level of greatest interactional detail through analysis of a Wolof linguistic routine, the greeting (nuyyu or dyammantë). The purpose of such an analysis is first of all to illustrate the importance of status ranking, and to identify the opportunities which individuals have to affect their own rank by manipulating the rules of interaction. A secondary purpose is to describe a familiar, though brief, cultural event in such a way that the impressions of the ethnographer can be related to the ‘set of rules for the socially appropriate construction and interpretation of messages’ (Frake 1964:132) which enables one to behave appropriately in this situation.

The greeting is of particular interest to a study of the Wolof because it occurs in every interaction. Every social relationship, therefore, must be at least partially statable in terms of the role structure of the greeting. That is, since certain roles are forced onto any interaction by the nature of the greeting exchange, those roles are ingredients in every social situation and basic to all personal alignments.

Folklore as a discipline has all too often existed in a vacuum from which texts are abstracted for the edification of outsiders about the cultural context of their performance. Recent collaboration between folklorists and anthropologists, much of which comes under the general rubric of sociolinguistics, has taken an important step toward correcting the limitations of such a perspective. Many students of traditional material have learned to expect and value different versions of the same story told by different individuals or by the same individual at different times depending on the nature of the social occasion. It has become clear that a living folk tradition has a potential for creativity and modification such that the most interesting text may be one which is adapted on the spot to a new audience or a new situation. The feedback between audience and performer may be crucial to the organization of a performance. The folklorist, as a result, can no longer rely solely on a tape recorder in front of an isolated informant, although that individual may be, in other contexts, an authentic performer of his folk tradition. Narrative performance is in essence social activity.

This paper will discuss in detail a single instance of creative performance by an old Cree man recognized by his community as a carrier and performer of traditional Cree cultural material.

The intent of this paper is to present a picture of the ways that Tzeltal (Maya) speakers themselves categorize their world of verbal communication, the ways that they talk about speech events occurring in their own cultural matrix. Instead of outlining a tightly defined and highly structured cultural domain and analyzing it exhaustively in terms of defining components on each level of contrast, I want to let the native terms and their glosses along with some explanation speak for themselves. There are two reasons for adopting this expository stance.

The first is that the meanings of the native terms as glossed embody the attributes of communicative events that we must assume the Tzeltal speakers single out as relevant and significant in specific situations. Thus, by simple inspection we can see what kinds of events the Tzeltal have chosen to label, what components and functions of speaking are focused on (cf. Hymes 1962), and what attributes of individual speech and speaking style are considered important enough to deserve names. In other words, I have not sought a single grammatical or social frame for generating a universe of discourse and analysis because a priori levels of organization are unnecessary at this point for an understanding of fundamental Tzeltal conceptualizations of verbal interaction.

The second, and more important reason, is that elicitation frames and abstract analysis would be more likely to obscure than to clarify the metalinguistic picture under consideration.

We start from the speech community conceived as an ‘organization of diversity’; we require concepts and methods that enable us to deal with that diversity, that organization. The great stumbling block is that the kinds of organization most developed by linguists presuppose the grammar as their frame of reference. (By grammar is meant here the genre of grammars.) Since its invention in classical antiquity, the grammar has been dominated by association with analysis of a single, more or less homogeneous, norm. In earlier periods the choice of norm was determined by social constraints. Linguistics, as grammar, came into existence to dissect and teach just that language, or language-variety, that embodied valued cultural tradition (Homeric Greek, the Sanskrit of the Vedas, the Chinese of the Confucian classics), not just any language; indeed, not any other language at all. The grammar, like the language, was an instrument of hegemony. In recent times the choice of norm has been determined often enough by factors intrinsic to the linguistic task. Although the class background of linguists favors the ‘standard’ of the schools, considerations of simplicity, clarity, fullness, of whatever is advantageous to the linguistic task itself, have also entered. Linguists have often been as decisive as schoolmasters in excluding things. With the schoolmaster, exclusion may have been for reasons of prestige and pedantry; with the linguist, it may most often have been for the sake of a model or an elegant result; but the consequence in relation to the speech patterns of a community as a whole has not been too different.

That verbal art and artistic verbal performance should figure prominently among the concerns of the ethnography of speaking is not surprising, since to participant and analyst alike the verbal art forms of a culture and the situations in which they are employed represent the most conspicuous, attractive, or powerful sectors of the speech activity of any society. Yet a truly ethnographic approach to verbal art, in the sense of a focus upon the situated use of verbal art forms conceived of as communicative process, is, like the ethnography of speaking itself, a relatively recent development. Anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists alike have tended over whelmingly to view verbal art, like language, as abstracted from social use. In all three disciplines, the unit of analysis in the study of verbal art has been the textual item, the myth, legend, song, or ritual speech, treated as a self-contained entity. To be sure, anthropologists at least have recognized and acknowledged the association of these items with events, but the principal frame of reference against which they have been studied – when such factors have been studied at all – is the culture or society as a whole. That is, the item is conceptualized as collective representation, shaped primarily by the shared culture, history, language, or character (in the collective psychological sense) of the members of the society in which it is current, and secondarily perhaps – more among folklorists than anthropologists – by the cumulative effects of long-term transmission through time and space.

The study of writing systems has had a long history within the discipline of anthropology and opinions concerning its importance, as well as the kinds of theoretical problems to which it should properly address itself, have exhibited considerable diversity. Nineteenth-century evolutionists seized upon the presence or absence of writing as typological criteria which, when used to define different levels of cultural development, served handily to distinguish ‘civilization’ from its antecedent stages (cf. Bastian 1860; Maine 1873; McClennan 1876; Tylor 1865). Shortly before 1900, interest shifted to the history of writing itself, and in the years that followed a number of unilinear schemes were propounded which purported to trace the evolution of graphic communication from its simplest forms to the appearance of full-blown alphabets (e.g., Cohen 1958; Diringer 1949, 1962; Fevrier 1948; Gelb 1963; Mallory 1886, 1893; Moorhouse 1953). In the 1930s and 40s, by which time American anthropologists had turned their attention to other issues, writing systems figured prominently in discussions of stimulus diffusion, independent invention, internal patterning, and the acceptance, rejection, and modification of diffused cultural traits (cf. Kroeber 1948). During the same period, however, the study of writing began to suffer at the hands of linguists. Depicted by members of the emergent structural school as a pale and impoverished reflection of language, writing was consigned to a position of decidedly minor importance.

It is a well documented fact that during the Colonial period, the Indians of Middle America often expressed their thoughts in semantic couplets (and occasionally, triplets). The largest corpus of such materials is in the Nahuatl language, but other languages such as Otomí, Quiché and Yucatec Maya are also represented. Garibay (1953) has documented the use of couplets by the Nahuas and Otomís of central Mexico. Edmonson (1971) has shown that the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché Maya of highland Guatemala, is written in semantic couplets; so too are the Chilam Balam of Chumayel and the Ritual of the Bacabs, both of which are written in Yucatec Maya (Edmonson 1968).

The essence of such couplet poetry is that ideas are expressed in parallel form.

Since at least the time of Descartes and Leibniz, there has been current in western thought a conception of language which holds that insofar as language is governed by laws, they are ‘the specifically linguistic laws of connection between linguistic signs, within a given, closed linguistic system … Individual acts of speaking are, from the viewpoint of language, merely fortuitous refractions and variations or plain and simple distortions of normatively identical forms' (Vološinov 1973:57; see also Hymes 1970a). The prominence, or predominance, of this view in our own century and our own time, makes it especially important to state at the outset of this book our commitment to a contrary view. This work is built on, and intended as a contribution to, a conception which holds that the patterning of language goes far beyond laws of grammar to comprehend the use of language in social life, that such organization inescapably involves the radical linking of the verbal and the sociocultural in the conduct of speaking. The field of inquiry devoted to the discovery of this organization is the ethnography of speaking.

Consistent with current views of the nature and purpose of ethnography, the ethnography of speaking may be conceived of as research directed toward the formulation of descriptive theories of speaking as a cultural system or as part of cultural systems.

When we published Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking back in 1974, we framed the work as ushering in a new phase of research in the ethnography of speaking. The first phase, beginning with the publication of Dell Hymes's foundational essay, ‘The Ethnography of Speaking,’ in 1962 and proceeding through the early 1970s, was preliminary and programmatic, marked by a series of articles and edited collections that sought to define this new subfield of linguistic anthropology and to suggest what kinds of research might be carried out under its aegis (see Preface; Bauman and Sherzer 1975). Much of this work was seen to be converging and contributing toward the ethnography of speaking, but not yet exemplifying it, insofar as little research published in that first period was expressly and primarily undertaken for a purpose that might appropriately be called the ethnography of speaking, that is, carrying out the program outlined by Hymes and Gumperz. By the early 1970s, however, the ethnography of speaking had finally developed to a point where a number of scholars had taken up the repeated calls for fieldwork issued in the first decade and carried out original research guided by its principles. Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking grew out of our mutual concern to present the first fruits of that research and to attempt to synthesize its results – however exploratory that synthesis might be – in a way that might help to shape the subsequent development of the field.

Like many sectarian religious groups, and in keeping with the fundamentally rhetorical nature of religion (Burke 1961), the Society of Friends (Quakers) was from its very beginning in the mid-seventeenth century highly concerned with and self-conscious about the social and spiritual use of language. In earlier papers, I have discussed some of the guiding principles and characteristics of Quaker sociolinguistic usage in the seventeenth century, including the Quaker notion of Truth, Quaker folkrhetorical theory, and the rhetorical implications of Quaker plain speech and silence (Bauman 1970, 1972, 1974). The purpose of the present paper is to develop further on the sociolinguistic history of the seventeenth century Quakers by discussing some of its basic themes from the perspective of a particular communicative role, the minister. In a Society which was itself set apart from its wider social environment by distinctive ways of speaking, the minister was further differentiated from his fellow Quakers as the bearer of the only role within the Society of Friends defined in terms of speaking. The role of the minister was the point at which two of the major and opposing themes in Quaker sociolinguistic usage came together, a structural center of the domain of speaking within the Society of Friends.

In addition to contributing to the sociolinguistic history of Quakerism (cf. Samarin 1971), this study is intended as a partial demonstration that the ethnographic perspective on the study of language use need not be restricted to fieldwork in contemporary settings, but may be effectively extended to historical cases as well.