Dell Hymes - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

He was educated at Reed College, studying under David H. French, and graduated in 1950 after a stint in prewar Korea. His work in the Army as a decoder is part of what influenced him to become a linguist. Hymes earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1955, and took a job at Harvard University.

Even at that young age, Hymes had a reputation as a strong linguist; his dissertation, completed in one year, was a grammar of the Kathlamet language spoken near the mouth of the Columbia and known primarily from Franz Boas’s work at the end of the 19th century.

Hymes remained at Harvard for five years, leaving in 1960 to join the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. He spent five years at Berkeley as well, and then joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 (where he succeeded A. Irving Hallowell). In 1972 he joined the Department of Folklore and Folklife and became Dean of Graduate School of Education in 1975.

He served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1982, of the American Anthropological Association in 1983, and of the American Folklore Society - the last person to have held all three positions. He was a member of the Guild of Scholars of The Episcopal Church. While at Penn, Hymes was a founder of the journal Language in Society. Hymes later joined the Departments of Anthropology and English at the University of Virginia, where he became the Commonwealth Professor of Anthropology and English, and from which he retired in 2000, continuing as emeritus professor until his death from complications of Alzheimer's disease on November 13, 2009.

His spouse, Virginia Hymes, is also a sociolinguist and folklorist.