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A Definition of Speech Community in Sociolinguistics
A Definition of Speech Community in Sociolinguistics
Humanities › Languages
Les Parau Parau ("Conversation") by Paul Gauguin (1891). (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
by Richard Nordquist
Updated May 16, 2018
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9/10/2018 A Definition of Speech Community in Sociolinguistics
distinct accent (think of Boston with its dropped r's) or small units like families and friends
(think of a nickname for a sibling). They help people define themselves as individuals and
community members and identify (or misidentify) others.
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Types of Communities
Speech communities can be large or small, although linguists don't agree on how they're
defined. Some, like linguist Muriel Saville-Troike, argue that it's logical to assume that a shared
language like English, which is spoken throughout the world, is a speech community. But she
differentiates between "hard-shelled" communities, which tend to be insular and intimate, like a
family or religious sect, and "soft-shelled" communities where there is a lot of interaction.
But other linguists say a common language is too vague to be considered a true speech
community. The linguistic anthropologist Zdenek Salzmann describes it this way:
"[P]eople who speak the same language are not always members of the same speech community.
On the one hand, speakers of South Asian English in India and Pakistan share a language with
citizens of the U.S., but the respective varieties of English and the rules for speaking them are
sufficiently distinct to assign the two populations to different speech communities..."
Instead, Salzman and others say, speech communities should be more narrowly defined based
on characteristics such as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and manner of speaking.
Sources
Morgan, Marcyliena H. "What Are Speech Communities?" Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Salzmann, Zdenek. "Language, Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology." Westview, 2004
Saville-Troike, Muriel. "The Ethnography of Communication: An Introduction, 3rd ed." Blackwell, 2003.
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