Definitions of the Speech Community

 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."

 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.

 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.

 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

 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."