Gerry Philipsen

Speech codes theory

“We all have to live in a universe bearing little resemblance to the place where we were born: we must all learn other languages, other modes of speech, other codes; and we all have the feeling that our own identity, as we have conceived of it since we were children, is threatened.”

Amin Malouf, In the name of identity: Violence and the need to belong, 2003, 37

Speech codes theory, which was first published explicitly as a theory in Philipsen (1997), provides answers to the following questions:

1. How can someone learn and report culturally distinctive ways of communicating that one encounters in a given social world?

2. How do cultural codes of communicative conduct shape and motivate the way people communicate with each other and make sense of self and others?

3. How and why do culturally distinctive codes of communicative conduct have the meaning-generating and motivating power that they have?

The theory consists of (1) extended development of the concept of speech codes, also known as culturally distinctive codes of communicative conduct, and of (2) six empirically-grounded (and empirically testable) propositions about speech codes.

The theory is fundamentally dependent on my long-term ethnographic work on Teamsterville and Nacirema cultural codes (see my Speaking Culturally). But it also rests on a much larger body of evidence. An important part of that body of evidence is the dissertations of my doctoral students. Taken together, these dissertations report empirical research on over two dozen speech communities. Most of these dissertations involved a year or more of full-time in situ fieldwork. Many of them were based on research conducted in a language other than English, with over ten language varieties represented. Such work, and that of many others in many other universities, constitutes the large corpus of published work about ways of communicating in different languages and cultures that I have used to build my theoretical account of speech codes.

Below you will find a selective bibliography of speech codes theory writings. For a fuller version of my long-term development and applications of speech codes theory, see the publications section on this site.

1. Gerry Philipsen, Speaking Culturally: Explorations in Social Communication. Albany: State University of New York, 1992). Chapter Seven presents the prototype of what was to become speech codes theory.

2. Gerry Philipsen, “A Theory of Speech Codes.” In Gerry Philipsen and Terrance A. Albrecht, Editors, Developing Communication Theories. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 119-156.

3. Em Griffin, “Speech Codes Theory (the Ethnography of Communication) of Gerry Philipsen,” Chapter 33 in A First Look at Communication Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997, 3^rd ed. 432-443.

4. Gerry Philipsen, Lisa M. Coutu, and Patricia Covarrubias, “Speech Codes Theory: Restatement, Revisions, and a Response to Criticisms.” In William Gudykunst, Editor, Theorizing about Intercultural Communication. Sage Publications, 2005. 55-68.

5. Gerry Philipsen, “Speech codes theory.” In International Encyclopedia of Communication. 2007.

6. Gerry Philipsen, “Speech codes theory and traces of culture in interpersonal communication.” In Leslie Baxter and Dawn Braithwaite, Editors, Engaging Theories in  Interpersonal Communication, Los Angeles: Sage Publications 2008. 269-280.

What is the future of speech codes theory? There are now several dissertations written that explicitly use and attempt to extend the theory. And others are being written. Recently some undergraduate students have written senior theses based on it. I am working on improving the theory, by reviewing published and about-to-be published ethnographies, and other writings, in an effort to sharpen its focus.

Several of my students and I are working on using the body of extant data to conduct data-based tests of speech codes theory and I would be pleased to communicate with other scholars who are interested in subjecting this theory to rigorous empirical testing. I have reason to believe there are several such tests that the theory can withstand. I want to test the theory’s limits and its force in an objective and impartial way. And I would like to see others perform such tests as well.

I see the results of these efforts at theory-testing as providing the basis for sharpening the theory as a tool for guiding how a person encountering a cultural situation that is unfamiliar or troubling to him or her can proceed artfully and effectively to learn a local code and take part constructively in the social world in which a code has some meaning and force. I think we are onto something important here. I think speech codes theory right now is the best set of answers to the questions it is designed to answer, and I think it has enormous potential for consequential practical use.

My essay, “Some Thoughts on How to Approach Finding One’s Way in Unfamiliar Cultural Terrain,” is a very accessible application of one aspect of the theory. The essay will appear in the journal Communication Monographs sometime in 2010. You can read a draft version of it here: CM manuscript 2009 Note: This is an informal use of the theory, intended to evoke comment more than to make a knock-down scholarly argument. The essay will appear in the journal’s Forum section. The Editor of the Forum invited Stella Ting-Toomey and me to write from our different perspectives on how to study culture. To read the essay, click on finding one’s way.