Sociolinguistics is conceived here as a fundamental critical perspective
on the whole of the study of language. The scientific problems within
present linguistics, the book contends, combine with social problems of
the society in which linguists participate to press linguistics to
discover ethnographic foundations. The work of providing such
foundations largely remains to be done. Working out the implications of
these three principles requires a new mode of description of linguistic
features and relationships, a mode which can treat the verbal means of a
community as a part of its organization of communicative means.
In Part One, Dell Hymes indicates the place of linguistic inquiry as
part of an inquiry into communicable conduct in general. Part Two
demonstrates the mutual relation between linguistics and other
disciplines that contribute to the common larger field--sociology,
social anthropology, education, folklore, and poetics are discussed. In
Part Three the author argues that problems within linguistic inquiry
suggest social foundations of linguistics deeper than presently assumed,
such that social meaning and stylistic function must be taken into
account systematically, and social life seen as a source of the
organization of linguistic means.