Communication ethnography studies how language is used in cultural environments, including nonverbal aspects of communication. It focuses on speech communities and how communication is organized within them. Researchers analyze different speech situations to determine how their structure and content are culturally determined.
Communication ethnography is an academic field of study that was first conceptualized as a branch of sociolinguistics by researchers in the 1950s and early 1960s. As an academic discipline, it studies and analyzes how language is used in cultural environments. Originally, this branch of study was actually called the ethnography of speaking, but the term was changed so that the field could also include studies in both nonverbal aspects of communication. Most of the studies done in this area, however, tend to focus primarily on speaking, as it is considered to be the primary means of communication.
As a discipline at least partially based on linguistics, ethnography of communication takes a slightly different view of communication and language than other linguistic theories, such as structuralism or transformational grammar. In contrast to these theories, it has as its basic premise, or theory, the idea that the meaning of a particular utterance or vocalization can only be understood in relation to the linguistic event or culture in which it is embedded. The view of this field is that communication is an uninterrupted flow of information and not an exchange or transmission of separate and disconnected messages. Communications, rather than specific languages, provide the framework for analyzing the place of language in a particular society or culture.
The focus of studies in the field is on individual speech communities, which are groups of people who use common signs to communicate. In particular, the ethnography of communication is concerned with how communication within a speech community is organized into various systems of communication events and how they interact with every other system in the culture. It seems to answer the basic question of what a speaker needs to know in order to communicate correctly and appropriately within a given speech community and how a speaker learns to do so.
A researcher might analyze different speech situations, such as ceremonies or speech events, such as sermons, greetings or compliments, to determine how their structure and content are culturally determined. Regardless of the study topic, researchers in the field of communication ethnography focus on a speech community. They study linguistic communities as diverse as African tribal groups or people in highly industrialized societies. Such a community could also be users of a website or bulletin board, if they share the rules for talking to each other online.
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