Adnana Medanović

SPEECH COMMUNITIES - LOUISE MULLANY

Within sociolinguistic study, the term speech community is very frequently used, and it is
commonly thought to be one of the discipline's main concepts. There has been and continues to
be a lot of discussion around the meaning and application of this term, and there's been a variety
of contrasting viewpoints.

DEFINING SPEECH COMMUNITIES

Speech communities do not exist merely because people have the same language or dialect.
Although English is spoken in various places around the world (South Africa, Canada, New
Zealand, etc.), as Wardhaugh (2005: 120) notes, English speakers in these countries cannot be
said to constitute a speech community because they speak in a number of different ways and are
separated from each other. Labov’s relevant and often-cited classification shifts the emphasis
away from the issues linked to a strictly linguistic definition:

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 behaviour, and by the uniformity of abstract patterns of variation which are
invariant in respect to particular levels of usage. Labov (1972b: 120–1)

Labov makes clear that speakers do not have to agree on the language they use or speak in the
same way in order for a speech community to exist, but they do have to agree on evaluative
standards. He found that while selected linguistic variables were pronounced differently by
members of various social class groupings, speakers from all social class groups style-shifted in
the same way when analyzing different speech styles, using more variants that were non-standard
while speaking in the most informal style, and vice versa. Britain and Matsumoto note that the
framework of Labov presumes a consensus model of society, whereby those speakers of the
lower class simply share the principles of the upper middle classes. The Milroys are often
identified with the alternative conflict model (Milroy and Milroy 1997b), which indicates that
there are distinct inequalities in society between unequal social groups, maintained by ideologies
of language that result in conflict.
The speech community concept has also been used in qualitative, ethnographic sociolinguistic
studies, as well as being a key concept in larger-scale quantitative sociolinguistic studies such as
Labov's.

SOCIAL NETWORKS

The model of social networks focuses on the social ties that individual speakers have with each
other, and explores how these ties influence the linguistic usage of speakers.

If members that you interact with interact with each other, a network is dense; otherwise, it is
loose. Dense and multiplex social networks tend to support localized linguistic norms and act as
a means of reinforcing the norm.

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

Holmes and Marra 2002). Eckert and McConnell-Ginet define a community of practice as:

An aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor. Ways of
doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short – practices – emerge in
the course of this mutual endeavor. (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992: 464)

Holmes and Meyerhoff (1999) point out that by considering speaker contact, social networks and
communities of practice can be distinguished. The social network approach involves individuals
who have 'limited or infrequent contact'; a community of pratice requires 'regular and mutually
defining interaction. Milroy and Gordon (2003) have considered social networks with
communities of practice, arguing that focus and method are primarily the differences between
them. While social networks seek to identify social links that are important to a person,
communities of practice seek to identify the 'clusters that form the crucial loci of linguistic and
social practice.'
MULTILINGUALISM - SUSAN GAL
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language by a single individual or community. The
knowledge and use of a single language, monolingualism, has been considered to be the natural
human condition. Yet, to a greater or lesser degree, both historically and today, most of the
world's communities and the majority of speakers are multilingual.

A TOUR OF MULTILINGUAL PRACTICES: BEYOND EUROCENTRISM

The native population of 10,000 was divided into more than twenty mutually exclusive groups in
the 1970s, according to anthropologist Jean Jackson (1974), each with a distinct name and a
distinct language that was not mutually intelligible with the others (such as Tukanoan, Arawak
and some from the Carib family). Every native person belongs, from birth, to one such group. All
Vaupés Indians share the same cultural traditions and live within a single territory, whatever
their language group. Women go to live in their husband's longhouse, so longhouses have
speakers of as many as four distinct, sometimes more, languages. Most communication takes
place not within a linguistic group, but across groups, and is made possible by the fact that all
Indians of Vaupés speak at least three languages fluently, many speak four or five, and some
understand as much as ten.

Anthropologists have found a high respect for linguistic diversity in Australia and among the
Vaupés, even though speakers value their own language(s) as ideal for communication.

There are diverse cultural conceptions about the relation between language and a speaker’s
identity (a good example- village of Kupwar). The language ideology of Kupwar and the
village's repertoire are the product of sociolinguistic transition on the subcontinent of India that
has been very different from that in Europe. There have been local vernaculars as well as
languages of broader distribution in both world regions over the last two millennia.

The minority languages are rarely valued as highly as national languages

The summary of the results

1. The territory, ethnic/cultural identity and language do not have a requisite relationship.
2. Local language ideologies mediate between socio-political arrangements, identity and
linguistic practice.
3. What is valued in language is also a matter of cultural principles, since these interact
with political regimes.
4. Cultural conceptions and institutional arrangements determine how speakers allocate
languages to social situations.

THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS OF STUDYING MULTILINGUALISM

Languages are internally organized units that can be studied independently from their social
contexts and their speakers' cultures (Ferdinand de Saussure). Mutual intelligibility is dependent
on sociocultural variables. Languages are products of social and cultural processes.

Once we understand 'language' as a social product, with boundaries that are actively created by
processes such as standardization and cultural differentiation, it is right to see monolingual and
multilingual speech communities as more similar than different.
Language, Ethnicity and Racism - Joshua A. Fishman

LANGUAGE AND ETHNICITY: OVERLOOKED VARIABLES IN SOCIAL THEORY AND

SOCIAL HISTORY

WHAT IS ETHNICITY? (Who are we? From where do we come? What is special about us?)

THE THEME OF FUNDAMENTAL 'ESSENCE'

 Many scholars and philosophers still hold that ethnicity and ethnogenesis  are a natural
and essential fact of human social life.

THE THEME OF METAMORPHOSIS

As Aristotle saw it, the problem of ethnicity was one of growing family affection, expanding the
natural links to one's own 'kind,' such that these links also involve those who are more distantly
related, rather than removing the initial links and bonds as such.

ETHNICITY AS DISRUPTIVE, IRRATIONAL, AND PERIPHERAL

Almost all ancient and medieval thinkers comment on the darker side of ethnicity, but generally
as only one side of the coin, i.e. just half of the entire phenomenon that has both positive and
negative characteristics (the more completely negative view begins with Plato).

Ethnicity strikes many Westerners to this very day as being peculiarly linked to 'all those crazy
little people and languages out there', to phenomena that are not  completely civilized and that
are more trouble than they are worth.

ETHNICITY AS CREATIVE AND HEALING

In every period, the joys of one's own language and ethnicity are subsequently expressed over
and over again. This feeling has been raised in modern times to a core principle, a celebration of
ethnic and linguistic diversity. It is argued that it is ethnic and linguistic diversity that makes life
worth living. It is creativity and beauty that make man human, based on ethnic and linguistic
diversity. The lack of such diversity would contribute to man's dehumanization, mechanization,
and total impoverishment.

ETHNICITY AND RACISM

Racism itself is one of the excesses into which ethnicity can develop

Racism necessarily requires greater recognition than ethnicity, not just because it is a 'ism,' but
because it focuses not only on authenticity and the celebration of difference but on the evaluation
of difference in terms of inherent better or worse, higher or lower... Any ethnicity is at risk of
developing ethnocentrism, i.e. the belief that one's own way of life is superior to all others. The
stance of simultaneously transcending ethnicity as a total, self-contained structure is a
characteristic of postmodern ethnicity.
LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY - JUDY DYER

According to Norton, identity is how people understand their relationship to the world, how that
relationship is constructed across time and space and how people understand their possibilities
for the future. (Norton 1997: 410)

Sociolinguistic research has been primarily concerned with describing and understanding
variation in patterns of speech, and what that variation may mean.

The main objective of most sociolinguistic research was to investigate why individuals speak
differently from each other (interspeaker variation) and why their own speech could often vary
(intraspeaker variation).

THREE WAVES OF SOCIAL VARIATION

1. The first wave, initiated by Labov (1966), used surveys and quantitative language as
methods to macro-social categories, such as social status, age, ethnicity and situating the
sex. individual in a
community or
2. Wave two used more ethnographic methods with categories proposed by the social group
participants themselves in an attempt to understand more locally grounded
linguistic variation.
3. Wave three studies focus on the social meaning of variables, with variation actually
constructing social categories and social meaning.

INDEXICALITY

The process by which language comes to be associated with specific locally or contextually
significant social characteristics is referred to as the indexicality of language. Indexicality entails
an association of a language or a linguistic form with some sort of socially meaningful
characteristic. It may sometimes work against the speaker, where the speaker’s dialect is
perceived and evaluated negatively by interlocutors.

IDENTITY AS A SOCIAL CATEGORY

-a speaker’s identity viewed through language was seen as fixed and as a product of certain
social factors

IDENTITY AS A CONTACT PHENOMENON

The individual speaker variation may also be clarified in terms of the speaker's network
connections.  The Milroys study recognized that communication with others was very significant
in terms of influences on the linguistic identity of the speaker.

SPEECH ACCOMMODATION THEORY

Giles's SAT was based on the idea that speakers could change their speech when interacting with
each other in order to align themselves or distance themselves from their interlocutors.

NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY

In comparison to the earlier sociolinguistic studies, sociolinguistic research now considers

identity as the primary subject of the investigation. Work on social and stylistic variations in
terms of speaker identity  is flourishing. (Understanding that identity is realized through
language in sometimes  oppositional ways).
MOBILITY, CONTACT AND ACCOMMODATION - PETER AUER

The term accommodation is used in two different ways in sociolinguistics. It refers to

interpersonal accommodation, i.e. the convergence of two or more interactants’way of speaking
within an interactional episode. On the other hand, it refers to what is sometimes called long-
term dialect accommodation, the convergence which may occur in speakers who change their
place of living more or less permanently within the same language area.

SOME BASIC DISTINCTIONS

Within the field of (long-term dialect) accommodation

It goes without saying that the repertoire of migrants and the receiving society may be of
different kinds. The most important constellations:

1. Although immigrants share a standard variety with the receiving area, they often use a
regional variety (dialect) that varies (more or less) from that of the receiving area.
2. The immigrants use a different standard variety from the receiving community (and often
also different regional varieties) - the case of migration from the United Kingdom into the
United States or vice versa…
3. The immigrants use a dialect, while in the receiving area a variety is spoken which is
close(r) to the standard variety - the case with immigration into the capital
4. The immigrants speak only dialect and the receiving area has a more complex repertoire
including a different dialect and an overarching standard

METHODS FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF ACCOMMODATION

Most investigations follow a real-time methodology : a group of migrants is observed over a

period of time (such as one or two years).

Apparent-time methodology- in this case, larger periods of time such as one or more decades
have been studied making use of the standard techniques of variationist sociolinguistics.
External factors influencing accommodation

Bortoni-Ricardo (1985) found a strong interaction with gender (female migrants dependent on
their grown-up children)

External factor which influences the amount of accommodation is age. Children and adolescents
are better dialect learners than adults (although this statement needs to be refined).

Internal (linguistic) factors influencing accommodation

Features with a high degree of linguistic awareness, which can be controlled consciously, are
better candidates for negative and/or positive accommodation than those which are used
unconsciously and are hard to control.
CREOLES AND PIDGINS - SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE

Recent debates:

-whether Creoles (and pidgins) are not genetically related to their lexifiers, the languages from
which they have evolved or whether they represent some kind of parentless language. Other
research on Creole has focused on societal and inter-individual variation.

DEFINING AND DESCRIBING CREOLES AND PIDGINS

An approach to creoles and pidgins (based largely on historical, economic and social
consideration of colonization) will also show that, contrary to the received doctrine, pidgins are
not the ancestors of creoles. In comparison to the Creoles, pidgins were usually associated with
trade colonies. Pidgins have also been derided as broken languages, since their structures are
reduced compared with those of their lexifiers. Most of the pidgins have died, others adapted to
changes differently and evolved into more complex varieties called expanded pidgins.

Many Creolists argued that modern Creoles and pidgins had both originated either from the
Mediterranean lingua franca used for trade or from the Portuguese lingua franca used on the
West African coast.

The main competing accounts today are the substrate hypothesis, the superstrate hypothesis,
the language bioprogram hypothesis and the imperfect second-language
learning/acquisition.

The strong modern version of the substratist account is known as the relexification hypothesis

The superstrate hypothesis is a bit misleading, since creolists such as Chaudenson  and Mufwene,
to whom the position is referred, do not deny substrate influence on the structures of the Creoles.

The language bioprogram hypothesis

Bickerton believes that the pidgins that supposedly followed the Creoles were syntaxless. The
children who used the lingua francas of their parents as vernaculars would have assigned them a
grammar influenced by the Universal Grammar, which he calls the bioprogram. However, even
the Creoles that have evolved from the same lexifier also vary from one another in relation to
some structural features.

The imperfect-second-language-learning hypothesis is an attempt to reconcile the non-

relexificationist substrate hypothesis and the language bioprogram hypothesis