Dell H. Hymes, a prominent anthropologist, linguist and folklorist whose work mined the rich, often overlooked territory where language and culture intersect, died on Nov. 13 in Charlottesville, Va. He was 82 and lived in Charlottesville.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his son Robert said.

At his death, Professor Hymes was the Commonwealth professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of Virginia, where he had taught from 1987 till his retirement in 1998.

Professor Hymes’s academic net was so wide that a single name for his field is hard to come by: he has been described variously as a sociolinguist, an anthropological linguist and a linguistic anthropologist. He himself came to call his vast, ecumenical discipline “the ethnography of communication.”

“He was an anthropologist through and through and a linguist through and through, and he didn’t see an enormous barrier between the two,” Joel F. Sherzer, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, said in a telephone interview on Friday.