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The Speech Community: Some Definitions

Peter L. Patrick

[This is from the handout for a talk I first gave at NWAVE-28, in Toronto on 17 October, 1999. Definitions are arranged in chronological order, more or less. This part constitutes a brief survey of classic definitions intended to show their diversity and general lack of agreement. For an extended treatment of the concept, see my article in JK Chambers, P Trudgill & N Schilling-Estes (eds.), Handbook of language variation and change, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.]

Some definitions and observations on the 'Speech Community'

(Commentary by PLP appears in italics and this typeface; quotations in this typeface)

·         Bloomfield (1926:153-4): "1. Definition. An act of speech is an utterance. 2. Assumption. Within certain communities successive utterances are alike or partly alike... 3. Definition. Any such community is a speech community."

·         Prague School approach: Neustupny coined the term Sprechbund ('speech area'); it involves "shared ways of speaking which go beyond language boundaries" (Romaine 1994:23). This is parallel to the older Sprachbund ('language area'), which involves "relatedness at the level of linguistic form" (ibid).

·         Gumperz (1962/71:101): 'linguistic community' is "a social group which may be either mono-lingual or multilingual, held together by frequency of social interaction patterns and set off from the surrounding areas by weaknesses in the lines of communication." LC's "may consist of small groups bound together by face-to-face contact or may cover large regions, depending on the level of abstraction we wish to achieve." A purely social concept.

·         Gumperz (1968/71:114): 'speech community': "any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage". A more restrictive concept, assuming a shared set of grammatical rules; emphasizes linguistic contrast w/outsiders. Gumperz also argues for regular relationships between language use and social structure. "The speech varieties employed within a speech community form a system because they are related to a shared set of social norms" (ibid.:116) but may overlap language boundaries: e.g. Czech, Austrian German, and Hungarian speakers may share norms for speech acts, topics, conversational participation, etc.

·         Gumperz (1982:24): "A system of organized diversity held together by common norms and aspirations. Members of such a community typically vary with respect to certain beliefs and other aspects of behavior. Such variation, which seems irregular when observed at the level of the individual, nonetheless shows systematic regularities at the statistical level of social facts."

·         Hymes (1967/72:54-5): "A community sharing rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech, and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety... A necessary primary term... it postulates the basis of description as a social, rather than a linguistic, entity." For Hymes one can participate in a speech community without being a member of it, but the lines of demarcation are not fixed or universal: eg. accent, ways of speaking, grammar, etc. in different communities or at different times in one community. Distinct from but related to Sprechbund, language field, speech field, speech network.

·         Labov (1972:120-1): "The speech community is not defined by any marked agreement in the use of language elements, so much as by participation in a set of shared norms. These norms may be observed in overt types of evaluative behavior, and by the uniformity of abstract patterns of variation which are invariant in respect to particular levels of usage."

·         Corder (1973:53): "A speech community is made up of individuals who regard themselves as speaking the same language; it need have no other defining attributes." An early, radical subjectivist view.

·         Rickford (1986): speech acts and attitudes in a single Guyanese village illustrate both concord and contrast in speech norms of Creole vs. standard. R challenges the "assumption of shared norms which virtually all sociolinguistic conceptions of the speech community contain... Some of a community's evaluative and speaking norms might be contrastive, even conflicting... The normative homogeneity and sociographic integrity which our current conceptions of speech community enshrine is mythical".

·         Duranti (1988:217-8): "The widest context of verbal interaction ... for sociolinguistic research is usually taken to be the speech community... Any notion of speech community... depend[s] on two sets of phenomena: (1) patterns of variation in a group of speakers also definable on grounds other than linguistic homogeneity (e.g...) and (2) emergent and cooperatively achieved aspects of human behavior as strategies for establishing co-membership in the conduct of social life. The ability to explain (1) ultimately relies on our success in understanding (2)."

·         Romaine (1994:22): "A speech community is a group of people who do not necessarily share the same language, but share a set of norms and rules for the use of language. The boundaries between speech communities are essentially social rather than linguistic... A speech community is not necessarily co-extensive with a language community." A synthesis of Gumperz and Hymes.

·         Hudson (1996:28-9, 229): The term 'speech community' misleads "by implying the existence of 'real' communities 'out there', which we could discover if we only knew how... Our socio-linguistic world is not organised in terms of objective 'speech communities'." Furthermore, he holds "It is impossible to understand the relationships that really matter to a sociolinguist except at the micro level of the individual person and the individual linguistic item... [Speech communities] turn out to be too fluid and ill-defined to be seriously studied in their own right."

·         Silverstein (1996:285) adopts a Hymesian notion of speech community, and contrasts it with 'linguistic community': "A linguistic community[:] a group of people who, in their implicit sense of the regularities of linguistic usage, are united in adherence to the idea that there exists a functionally differentiated norm for using their 'language' denotationally... [which is] said to define the 'best' speakers of language L." Notes such speakers may not actually exist; points to conflict of norm w/ everyday usage.

·         Duranti (1997:82) recommends abandoning the speech community as "an already constituted object of inquiry", and instead taking it as "a point of view of analysis". He defines it as "the product of the communicative activities engaged in by a given group of people".

·         Santa Ana & Parodí (1998): "We propose a model of nested speech-community configurations... arranged in terms of distinct types of linguistic variables which in turn reflect increasingly expanding fields of interaction that individuals maintain with pertinent others" as well as "distinct types of knowledge" of the "linguistic hierarchy", reflected in "the evaluation of socially marked linguistic variables" of three types: stigmatized, regional and standard variables.

·         Holmes & Meyerhoff (1999:178-9): "Membership in a speech community depends on social or behav-ioral properties that one possesses... [The speech community concept has] nothing to say about maintenance or (de)construction of boundaries between categories" (of membership, presumably).

·         Bucholtz (1999:203-7): "In sociolx, social theory is rooted in the concept of the speech community... a language-based unit of social analysis... indigenous to sociolinguistics [which] is not connected to any larger social theory... 6 ways in which the speech community has been an inadequate model...: Its (a) tendency to take language as central, (b) emphasis on consensus as the organizing principle of community, (c) preference for studying central members of the community over those at the margins, (d) focus on the group at the expense of individuals, (e) view of identity as a set of static categories, (f) valorization of researchers' interpretations over participants' own understandings of their practices."

References

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1926. "A set of postulates for the science of language." Language 2:153-4.

Bucholtz, Mary. 1999. " 'Why be normal?' Language and identity practices in a community of nerd girls." Language in Society 28(2):203-223.

Corder, S. Pit. 1973. Introducing applied linguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Duranti, Alessandro. 1988. "Ethnography of speaking: Towards a linguistics of the praxis." In FJ Newmeyer ed. 1988 Linguistics: The Cambridge survey, vol. IV. Language: The socio-cultural context. Cambridge UP.

Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gumperz, John. 1962. "Types of linguistic communities." Anthropological Linguistics 4(1):28-40. [Reprinted in J Fishman ed. 1968, Readings in the sociology of language:460-472.]

Gumperz, John. 1968. "The speech community." International encyclopedia of the social sciences:381-6. Macmillan. [Reprinted in P.Giglioli, ed. 1972, Language and Social Context: 219-31.]

Gumperz, John. 1971. Language in social groups. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gumperz, John. 1982. Language and social identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holmes, Janet & Meyerhoff, Miriam. 1999. "The community of practice: Theories and methodologies in language and gender research." Language in Society 28(2): 173-83.

Hudson, Richard A. 1996 (2nd edition.). Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hymes, Dell. 1972. "Models of the interaction of language and social life." (Revised from 1967 paper.) In Gumperz & Hymes, eds. 1972 Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication. Blackwell:35-71.

Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Phila.: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.

Patrick, Peter L. 2002. "The speech community." In JK Chambers, P Trudgill & N Schilling-Estes (eds.), Handbook of language variation and change. Oxford: Blackwell, 573-597.

Rickford, John R. 1986. "Contrast and concord in the characterization of the speech community." Sheffield Working Papers in Language and Linguistics, No. 3.

Romaine, Suzanne. 1994. Language in society: An introduction to sociolinguistics. London: Blackwell.

Santa Ana, Otto & Parodí, Claudia. 1998. "Modeling the speech community: Configurations and variable types in the Mexican Spanish setting." Language in Society27(1):23-51.

Silverstein, Michael 1996. "Monoglot 'standard' in America: Standarization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony" In D Brenneis & R Macaulay eds. The matrix of language: Contemporary linguistic anthropology, 284-306.

 

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Last updated on 11 October 2002