Dell Hymes (1972) introduced the concept of communicative competence in the 1960s. Hymes is of view that a communicator must develop two kinds of competence to communicate effectively: communicative competence and linguistic competence. While linguistic competence involves producing and comprehending sentences that follow grammatical rules, communicative competence involves producing and understanding statements or utterances within a specific context or situation.

Hymes emphasized the importance of performance, asserting that one must not only know the phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic rules of grammar in a language but also be able to apply these in appropriate communication contexts. He highlighted the need for appropriateness, which involves knowing and applying the rules that govern “both the referential and social meaning of language.”

For instance, even if you know all the words in the English dictionary or the grammatical rules of the language, you won’t be considered a competent communicator if you don’t know when to utter a particular statement.