A Note on Speech Community - Zawad Rami

Introduction

The speech community is a term in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology used to describe a group of people who share the same language, language characteristics, and ways of interpreting communication. Speech communities can be large areas such as an urban area with a common, distinct accent (think of Boston) or small units like families and friends (think of a nickname for a brother). They help people define themselves as individuals and members of the community and identify (or misidentify) others.  

Early definitions tended to view language communities as limited, localized groups of people who live together and come to share the same language norms because they belong to the same local community. It has also been assumed that within a community, a homogeneous set of standards should exist. These assumptions have been challenged by subsequent studies that have shown that individuals typically participate in various speaking communities simultaneously and at different times in their lives. Each language community has different norms that they tend to share only partially. Communities can be off-site and unlimited rather than local, and they often include different sub-communities with different speaking norms. With the recognition that speakers actively use language to construct and manipulate by signaling their belonging to particular speech communities, the idea of a limited speech community with homogeneous speech standards has been largely abandoned for a model based on speech community as a fluid community of practice. 

A speech community comes to share a specific set of language use norms by living and interacting

together, and so speech communities can emerge among all groups that interact frequently and share certain norms and ideologies. These groups can be villages, countries, political or professional communities, communities sharing interests, hobbies or lifestyles, or even just groups of friends. Discourse communities can share both particular sets of vocabulary and grammatical conventions, as well as styles and genres of speech, as well as norms about how and when to speak in a particular way. 

Speech and Identity

The concept of speech as a means of identifying with a community first appeared in the 1960s in academic circles along with other new areas of research, such as ethnic and gender studies. Linguists such as John Gumperz pioneered research on how personal interaction can affect ways of speaking and interpreting, while Noam Chomsky studied how people interpret language and derive meaning from what they see and hear.

Types of Communities 

Speech communities can be large or small, although linguists do not agree on the way they are defined. Some, such as the linguist Muriel Saville-Troike, argue that it is reasonable to assume that a common language such as English, which is spoken all over the world, is a community of speech. But it distinguishes between "harsh" communities, which tend to be island and intimate, such as a family or religious sect, and "soft" communities where there is a lot of interaction.

But other linguists say that a common language is too vague to be considered a true community of speech. The linguistic anthropologist Zdenek Salzmann describes it as follows:

"People who speak the same language are not always members of the same speaking community. On the one hand, South Asian English speakers in India and Pakistan share a language with US citizens, but the respective varieties of English and the rules for their speech are distinct enough to assign the two populations to different speaking communities.” 

Instead, Salzmann and others say that speech communities should be more narrowly defined based on traits such as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and speaking style.

Conclusion

The concept of the community of speech plays a role in several social sciences, namely sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and even psychology. People who study migration and national identity issues use the theory of social community to study things like how immigrants are assimilated into larger societies, for example, academics who focus on racial, ethnic, sexual, or gender issues apply the theory of social community when studying issues of personal identity and politics. It also plays a role in data collection.