In 1962, Dell Hymes proposed the project he subsequently named the ethnography of communication (Hymes 1961, 1962, 1964b). Its central motive was to create a theory of linguistic communication which is grounded in the comparative analysis of many communities and their distinctive ways of speaking. Just as there is a comparative politics, law, religion, and so forth, he said, so should there be a comparative analysis of “studies ethnographic in basis and communicative in scope” (Hymes 1964b:9). Such studies would be “whole ethnographies focused on communicative behavior” (1964b:9) and would be guided by, and subsequently used to guide the revision of, a descriptive framework which itself is a model of sociolinguistic description.