SPEAKING: elements, conventions and codes of spoken communication

What is communication?

A process by which a sender establishes a relationship with a receiver in order to exchange knowledge, beliefs, emotions, and intentions using a system of signs.

The spoken message, however, travels over several channels, engaging several senses at once and drawing at the same time on different and complex languages and codes. This complexity tells us that in any communication, encoding and decoding never coincide completely (as in the game of telephone). The distance between the sender’s intention and the receiver’s decoding is amplified when codes and modes are not fully shared. Anyone in a profession of which communication is an integral part has an interest in putting the other person or the audience at ease, taking it upon themselves to bridge the cultural distance.

In a world where we often come into contact with people who speak other languages and come from different cultures, we find ourselves relying more and more on automatic translation tools such as Google Translate (Skype Translator, mentioned in the first version of this article, no longer exists: Microsoft shut down Skype on May 5, 2025). Obviously the person we are talking to will also be aware of the limits of these tools. In fact, even using an intermediary who has studied the language does not always give good results.

Anyone who stands in front of people from backgrounds different from their own must bear in mind that cultural distance can cause misunderstanding, mistrust, and doubt. This is all the more true of predominantly one-way communication (courses, presentations), where the communicator cannot get immediate, direct feedback on whether the message has been understood.

Communicative competence is the ability to use language in a way that is appropriate to the situation: knowing when to speak, about what, with whom, and in what manner. In 1974, in “Foundations in Sociolinguistics,” the anthropologist Dell Hymes developed a model based on the idea that, to speak a language correctly, it is not enough to know the vocabulary and the grammar; one must also know the context in which the words are used (D. Hymes, Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974).

To this end he built a model, representing it with the acronym SPEAKING (explained in this entertaining video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cniJ6TIjygY), in which he lists the elements, conventions, and codes involved in spoken communication:

• Setting and Scene: the time and place in which the speech takes place and the psychological and cultural frame of the event.
• Participants (speaker, addressor, hearer, addressee): who is speaking and who is listening.
• Ends (purposes): the purpose of the communication.
• Act sequence (message form and message content): what is said, in what form, and in what order.
• Key: the tone in which one speaks (humorous, serious, …).
• Instrumentalities (channels and forms of speech): the channel used (voice, writing, telephone) and the forms of speech (language, dialects, professional registers, slang).
• Norms (norms of interaction and of interpretation): the conventions of the communication (length, manner, …).
• Genres: e.g., announcement, poem, tale.

When preparing a speech or presentation, it is important to check that all these points have been taken into account, bearing in mind that the ultimate aim is to convey a clear, comprehensible message to someone who is not necessarily interested in making an extra effort to understand.

When we communicate with a person who belongs to our own cultural context, we take for granted many things that we cannot neglect when communicating with people who come from other backgrounds.

Every communication takes place after a negotiation and therefore a communication contract (the concept is Rodolphe Ghiglione’s). In this negotiation the participants agree on how the communication will work, on the structure of the relationship, and on their knowledge of the world.

(Alberto Viotto)