Dell Hymes

Dell Hathaway Hymes, who lived from June 7, 1927 to November 13, 2009, was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology linguistic anthropology instead of anthropological linguistics, and in 1972 he founded the journal Language in Society and served as its editor for 22 years. He coined the term communicative competence in 1966.