Speech community
A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations regarding the use of language.[1] It is a concept mostly associated with sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics.
Exactly how to define speech community is debated in the literature. Definitions of speech community tend to involve varying degrees of emphasis on the following:
A typical speech community can be a small town, but sociolinguists such as William Labov claim that a large metropolitan area, for example New York City, can also be considered one single speech community.
Early definitions have tended to see speech communities as bounded and localized groups of people who live together and come to share the same linguistic norms because they belong to the same local community. It has also been assumed that within a community a homogeneous set of norms should exist. These assumptions have been challenged by later scholarship that has demonstrated that individuals generally participate in various speech communities simultaneously and at different times in their lives. Each speech community has different norms that they tend to share only partially. Communities may be de-localized and unbounded rather than local, and they often comprise different sub-communities with differing speech norms. With the recognition of the fact that speakers actively use language to construct and manipulate social identities by signalling membership in particular speech communities, the idea of the bounded speech community with homogeneous speech norms has become largely abandoned for a model based on the speech community as a fluid community of practice.
A speech community comes to share a specific set of norms for language use through living and interacting together, and speech communities may therefore emerge among all groups that interact frequently and share certain norms and ideologies. Such groups can be villages, countries, political or professional communities, communities with shared interests, hobbies, or lifestyles, or even just groups of friends. Speech communities may share both particular sets of vocabulary and grammatical conventions, as well as speech styles and genres, and also norms for how and when to speak in particular ways.
Critique[edit]
Probably because of their considerable explanatory power, Labov's and Chomsky's understandings of the speech community became widely influential in linguistics. But gradually a number of problems with those models became apparent.[6]
Firstly, it became increasingly clear that the assumption of homogeneity inherent in Chomsky and Labov's models was untenable. The African American speech community which Labov had seen as defined by the shared norms of African American Vernacular English, was shown to be an illusion, as ideological disagreements about the status of AAVE among different groups of speakers attracted public attention.[7][8]
Secondly, the concept of the speech community was large scale communities. By extending the concept, Gumperz's definition could no longer be evoked.
Thirdly, Chomsky and Labov's models made it clear that intrapersonal variation is common. The choice of linguistic variant is often a choice made within a specific speech context.
The force of these critiques with the concept of "speech communities" appeared due to many contradictions. Some scholars recommended abandoning the concept altogether, instead conceptualizing it as "the product of the communicative activities engaged in by a given group of people."[9] Others acknowledged the community's ad hoc status as "some kind of social group whose speech characteristics are of interest and can be described in a coherent manner".[10]
Practice theory[edit]
Practice theory, as developed by social thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens and Michel de Certeau, and the notion of the community of practice as developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger has been applied to the study of the language community by linguists William Hanks[11][12][13][14] and Penelope Eckert.[15][16][17][18]
Eckert aimed at an approach to sociolinguistic variation that did not include any social variable (e.g. class, gender, locality). Instead she built a model that was able to locate variables that show significant issue to the group of individuals. For Eckert the crucial defining characteristics of the community is persistent through time to comprehend together.[17]
Hanks' concept of the linguistic community is different from that of Eckert and Gumperz, it studies the ways in shared practice production of linguistic meaning. Hanks studies how linguistic practices are related to a variety that are produced through shared practices.
Language variation[edit]
The notion of speech community is most generally used as a tool to define a unit of analysis within which to analyse language variation and change. Stylistic features differ among speech communities based on factors such as the group's ethnicity and social status, common interests and the level of formality expected within the group and by its larger society.[19]
Common interests and the level of formality also result in stylistic differences among speech communities. In Western culture, for example, employees at a law office would likely use more formal language than a group of teenage skateboarders because most Westerners expect more formality and professionalism from practitioners of law than from an informal circle of adolescent friends. This special use of language by certain professions for particular activities is known in linguistics as register; in some analyses, the group of speakers of a register is known as a discourse community, while the phrase "speech community" is reserved for varieties of a language or dialect that speakers inherit by birth or adoption.