SPEECH COMMUNITY

A.    Sociolinguistics

The study about the use of language within or among groups of speakers

Groups

ü    Must have at least two members. Reasons: social, religious, political, cultural,

familial, vocational, etc.

ü    May be temporary or quasi-permanent

ü    The purposes of its members may change

ü    Its members may come and go

ü    They may also belong to other groups and may or may not meet face-to-face

ü    The organization of the group may be tight or loose

ü    The importance of group membership is likely to vary among individual

within the group

B.     Definition of Speech Community

1.   A Community

A group of people with shared a set of activities, practices, beliefs, and social structures.

Example: Community of agriculture, Community of education that makes different grade/ level based on student’s age, etc.

2.   A Speech Community

A group of people who share similar ideas, uses and norms of language is in a location.

Example: Community of transsexual who has and speaks with their own language sometimes makes other people don’t know what they are talking about.

3.   Language Variety

Refers to a set of communicative forms and norms for their use that are restricted to a particular group, community or activity

Example: Bristol English, Texas English, Canadian English, London English, Standard English, etc.

Furthermore, the relationship both of speech community and language variety such as:

1.      The speech varieties employed within a speech community form a system because they are related to a shared set of social norms. Such norms, however, may overlap what we must regard as clear language boundaries.

2.      A speech community has their language variety in society. Even not all of them has it. They use the language according to a set of norms to share enough characteristics of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, etc.

C.    Aspects causes of Speech Community

·         Age

·         Social Class

·         Education

·         Occupation / Hobbies

·         Region / Space

·         Family

·         Religion

·         Gender

·         Ethnicity / Race

D.    Five Elements of The Speech Community

Elements of the speech community are population, area, facility, identification and interaction. Population and area are called as foundational condition while facility, identification and interaction are improving condition.

E.     Intersecting Communities

Definition:

People do use expressions indicates that they have some idea of how a “typical” person from each place speaks à to be a member of a particular speech community somewhat loosely defined

E.g. Arabic Speech, Japan Speech, Sundanese Speech

Each person speaks their own “typical way according to its place of origin or specific speech community

Rosen claims that cities cannot be thought of as a linguistic patchwork maps, ghetto after ghetto because:

1.      Language and dialects have no simple geographical distribution

2.      Interaction between them blurs whatever boundaries might be drawn

F.     Network Relationships

Networks Relationship is divided by two. There are open network and close network. It will be called open network when provides open access to its users. Information is often new and of importance, a (serious) blogger and visitors of blog. Then close network is mostly strong ties. Information that flows in those networks tends to be redundant and inefficient.

Conclusion

v  It is important to remember that group is a relative concept with respect to speech community

v  Also that an individual belongs to various speech communities, at the same time, but he/she will identify with only one of them

v  There are many definitions for speech community which are all different too simple and too complex

v  This is the example of how speech community happens and why they hay different language. In Eastern Europe many speakers of Czech, Austrian German, and Hungarian share rules about the proper forms of greetings, suitable topics for conversation, and how to pursue these, but no common language. They are united in a sparch bund, ‘speech area,’ not quite a ‘speech community,’ but still a community defined in some way by speech. As we can see, then, trying to define the concept of ‘speech community’ requires us to come to grips with definitions of other concepts, principally ‘group,’ ‘language’ (or ‘variety’), and ‘norm.’

Source:

Wardhaugh, Ronald. 2006. An Introduction to sociolinguistics. UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (Page: 119-132)

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