Sociolinguistics: Speech Community

Speech Community

What is Speech Community?

Language is social and individual possession, so the idea of speech community exists within a group of people sharing the same linguistic norms and expectation.

The term speech community is derived from the German Sprachgemeinschaft.

“A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations with regard to how their language should be used”. 

Certain ambiguities in defining the term Speech Community

There are certain ambiguities related to the term and its exact used. So the speech community involves varying degrees of emphasis on;

1.     Shared community membership

  2.     Shared linguistics communication

Speech Community & Groups in Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics studies language in the society and among groups of speakers, so a group has few characteristics.

1.       Group has at least two or more than two members.
2.       People can be grouped together for social, religious, cultural,      political, professional and vocational purposes.
3.       Belong to other groups and may or may not even meet face-to-face.
4.      Organization of the group may be tight or loose.

Definitions of Speech Community

1.   “All the people who use given language /dialect is called speech community (Lyons, 1970).”

1.     “A speech community as a group of people who interact by means of speech’ (Bloomfield, 1933).”

2.     “A speech community is 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 (Gumperz, 1971).”

3.     “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 with respect to particular levels of usage (Labov, 1972).”

Characteristics of Speech Community

•    Group of people using the same language, dialect, words and grammatical rules as standard.
•      Share a specific set of norms for language use through living and interacting together.
•      Face to face contact is not necessary.
•      Speakers can be monolingual or multilingual but a group held together by frequency of social interaction and set off from surroundings due to their linguistics norms.

Examples of Speech Communities

ü All English speakers in the world belong to the same speech community.

ü Speaking same language by the group does not mean belonging to the same community. For instance, speakers of South Asian English in India and Pakistan shared a language with the British or American English speakers without sharing their communities.

 Conclusion

A speech community is a group of people sharing linguistics norms and values during the frequency of interaction which can be direct or face to face or indirect without sharing the same community.