5.11.2018.

PROMPT 2

• Speech community is…..

DEFINING GROUPS
(SPEECH COMMUNITY)

• Language as individual and social possession. • To say of any member of such a group that he or she will always
• Speech community (difficulties with definition) exhibit a certain characteristic behavior is to offer a stereotype.
• Sociolinguistics is the study of language use within or among groups • We must be careful in drawing conclusions about individuals on the
of speakers. basis of observations we make about groups that we have defined for
our research purposes.
• Concept of group.
• People can group together for one or more reasons: social, religious,
political, cultural, familial, vocational, and so on.
• The organization of the group may be tight or loose and the
importance of group membership is likely to vary among individuals
within the group.

LINGUISTIC BOUNDARIES

• For purely theoretical purposes, some linguists have hypothesized the • Speech community is not coterminous with a language: the English
existence of an ‘ideal’ speech community. language is spoken in many places throughout the world, but it is
• This is actually what Chomsky proposes, his ‘completely spoken in a wide variety of ways - in speech communities that are
homogeneous speech-community’ - it is a theoretical construct almost entirely isolated from one another.
employed for a narrow purpose. • Linguistic criteria or other criteria?
• Speech communities exist in a ‘real’ world. • Speakers do use linguistic characteristics to achieve group identity
• Lyons (1970, 326) offers a definition of what he calls a ‘real’ speech with, and group differentiation from, other speakers, but they use
community: ‘all the people who use a given language (or dialect).’ other characteristics as well: social, cultural, political, and ethnic.

1
 5.11.2018.

• We should also note that a recognizable single speech community can

employ more than one language, whether we use national boundaries to
define it, e.g., • We are using the concept of communicative competence, that is, that
• Switzerland, Canada, Papua New Guinea, all countries with more than one speakers within a speech community share a sense of social norms in
official language), discourse, along with ideas about the social group identities indexed by
• City (or city-state) designations (e.g., Berlin, Singapore, New York City, various varieties or features of language.
where multiple languages are used for everyday interactions, education, and
commerce), or • Thus the relationship between language and social structure is
• Neighborhood boundaries (e.g., in San Francisco’s Chinatown both paramount in the development of the concept of the speech
Cantonese and English are commonly used). community.
• One approach to defining a speech community often taken in • This includes the idea that there are different levels of speech
sociolinguistics is to say that the speakers in such a community share some communities which correspond to different types of social groups.
kind of common feeling about linguistic behavior in that community, i.e.
they observe certain linguistic norms.

• It is also possible for speakers to share certain norms for language when they do • Internally, a community must have a certain social cohesiveness;
not share linguistic systems. externally, its members must find themselves cut off from other
• For example, in Eastern Europe many speakers of Czech, Austrian German, and communities in certain ways.
Hungarian share rules about the proper forms of greetings, suitable topics for
conversation, and how to pursue these, but no common language. • Thus, it is context and contrast that help us decide what level of
• They are united in a Sprachbund (‘speech area’), not quite a speech community, speech community is relevant.
but still a community defined in some way by speech.
• This approach would suggest that there is an English speech
• Gumperz (1971, 101) points out that ‘there are no a priori grounds which force us community (because there are French and German ones), a
to define speech communities so that all members speak the same language.’
Melbourne speech community (because there are London and
• Such considerations as these lead Gumperz to use the term linguistic
community rather than speech community. Bostonian ones), a Harvard speech community (because there are
•
Oxford and Berkeley ones)

• Groups and communities themselves are ever changing, their boundaries are • A community of practice is at the same time its members and what its
often porous, and internal relationships shift. members are doing to make them a community: a group of workers in
• They must constantly reinvent and recreate themselves. a factory, an extended family, an adolescent friendship group, a
• One way sociolinguists try to get at this dynamic view of social groups is women’s fitness class, a Kindergarten classroom, and so on.
with the idea that speakers participate in various communities of • Bucholtz argues that within the community of practice framework, we
practice.
can define a social group by all social practices, not just language.
• Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1998, 490) define a community of practice as
‘an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagements in • This concept can also incorporate the idea that there may be conflict
some common endeavor. within a group about these practices and norms, and thus marginal
• Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in members of communities, as individuals, can be better included in the
short, practices – emerge in the course of their joint activity around that analysis.
endeavor.’

2
 5.11.2018.

SOCIAL NETWORKS

• There are also studies which seek to expand on the community of • How people in a social network are linked to each other is one way
practice concept of conflict, not consensus, as part of interaction. of viewing social groups as defined by the kinds, frequency, and
constellation of social interactions.
• Davies (2005, 1) argues that the idea of legitimacy is central in
community of practice analyses and power structures cannot be • You are said to be involved in a dense social network if the people
ignored: ‘While practices may define the community, the community you know and interact with also know and interact with one another.
determines who has access to that practice.’ • If they do not do so, the social network is a loose one.
• Moore (2006) looks at narratives told among high school students in • You are also said to be involved in a multiplex social network if
the northwest of England, noting that status inequalities can lead to the people within it are tied together in more than one way, that is,
inequitable allocation of control within a community of practice, and not just through work but also through other social activities.
that such hierarchies must be taken into account in the study of
community-building and identity construction.

• Milroy (1980) shows that in several working class areas of Belfast,

groups with dense, multiplex social networks fostered social
solidarity which in turn served to enforce linguistic norms.
• The differences in social networks could be used to explain
differences between different areas that were all categorized as
‘working class.’
• They could also account for gender differences within areas where
gender roles and patterns of occupation were quite distinct.

MODERN SOCIAL NETWORKS

SOCIAL IDENTITIES

• The recent availability of computers, smart phones, and other • Identity may be constructed through a variety of linguistic means.
devices has produced entirely new types of networking which • E.g., the use of certain lexical forms or language varieties may
many people now use extensively, and there is now a body of contribute to the identification of a speaker, particular communicative
research which looks at how these virtual networks function as practices, such as the uses of silence, greeting formulas, or gaze, etc.
speech communities
• Much of the literature on language and identity is based on the post
• Network analysis typically deals with structural and content structuralist idea that social practices (such as language use) produce
properties of the ties that constitute egocentric personal networks and reproduce the social world, including speaker identities.
... [but] cannot address the issues of how and where linguistic
• The term ‘identity’ is used here to describe a primarily social rather
variants are employed ... to construct local social meanings.
than psychological phenomenon: identity is not the source but the
• Rather, it is concerned with how informal social groups . . . support outcome of linguistic practice.
local norms or . . . facilitate linguistic change.’

3
 5.11.2018.

• In the social constructionist sense, the term identity is used to invoke • Each individual is a member of many different groups.
the interactively developed self that is multiple, fragmented, and
• It is in the best interests of most people to be able to identify
fluctuating.
themselves on one occasion as members of one group and on
• Identities are contrastive and fluid; e.g. we may identify as similar to a another as members of another group.
person in one situation, and as different in another.
• One of the consequences of the intersecting identifications is, of
• In some cases, identity categorizations may be imposed upon course, linguistic variation: all people do not speak alike, nor does any
individuals by others or they may be severely constrained by others’ individual always speak in the same way on every occasion.
perceptions.
• The study of language and identity is the study of the linguistic means
through which membership assignations are made and how language
is used to create, embrace, resist, or alter group boundaries.

IDEOLOGIES
DISCUSSION POINTS
• Errington (2000, 115) describes the study of language ideologies
as ‘a rubric for dealing with ideas about language structure and use 1. What speech community or communities do you individually
relative to social contexts.’ belong to?
• There are certain hegemonic ideologies about different ways of 2. What are the social characteristics of your speech community?
speaking that dominate in a society and are widely accepted, even by What are the linguistic characteristics?
speakers of the varieties which are judged as deficient. 3. Do you find that the primary criteria are social or linguistic?
• The study of non-linguists’ ideas about the regions, features, and 4. How much diversity is there within your speech community?
values of dialects has come to be called perceptual dialectology.
5. If you belong to more than one speech community, what different
kinds of configurations are there – mono/multilingual; large/small;
permanent/short-termed; based on geography or age etc.

6. How do these speech communities relate to each other, e.g. are they
overlapping?
7. Is this sociolinguistics class itself a speech community? Why/why not?
8. Can you draw a picture of your social networking?