Download Speech Communities: Defining the Concept and Its Complexities and more Schemes and Mind Maps English in PDF only on Docsity!
5 Speech Communities
Language is both an individual possession and a social possession. We would expect, therefore, that certain individuals would behave linguistically like other individuals: they might be said to speak the same language or the same dialect or the same variety, i.e., to employ the same code, and in that respect to be members of the same speech community , a term probably derived from the German Sprachgemeinschaft. Indeed, much work in sociolinguistics is based on the assumption that it is possible to use the concept of ‘speech community’ without much difficulty. Hudson (1996, p. 29) rejects that view: ‘our sociolin- guistic world is not organized in terms of objective “speech communities,” even though we like to think subjectively in terms of communities or social types such as “Londoner” and “American.” This means that the search for a “true” definition of the speech community, or for the “true” boundaries around some speech community, is just a wild goose chase.’ We will indeed discover that just as it is difficult to define such terms as language , dialect , and variety , it is also difficult to define speech community , and for many of the same reasons. That difficulty, however, will not prevent us from using the term: the concept has proved to be invaluable in sociolinguistic work in spite of a certain ‘fuzziness’ as to its precise characteristics. It remains so even if we decide that a speech community is no more than some kind of social group whose speech character- istics are of interest and can be described in a coherent manner.
Definitions
Sociolinguistics is the study of language use within or among groups of speakers. What are groups? ‘Group’ is a difficult concept to define but one we must try to grasp. For our purposes, a group must have at least two members but there is really no upper limit to group membership. People can group together for one or more reasons: social, religious, political, cultural, familial, vocational, avocational, etc. The group may be temporary or quasi-permanent and the purposes of its members may change, i.e., its raison d’être. A group is also more than its members for they may come and go. They may also belong to other groups and may or may not meet face-to-face. The organization of the group
may be tight or loose and the importance of group membership is likely to vary among individuals within the group, being extemely important to some and of little consequence to others. An individual’s feelings of identity are closely re- lated to that person’s feelings about groups in which he or she is a member, feels strong (or weak) commitment (or rejection), and finds some kind of success (or failure). We must also be aware that the groups we refer to in various research studies are groups we have created for the purposes of our research using this or that set of factors. They are useful and necessary constructs but we would be unwise to forget that each such group comprises a set of unique individuals each with a complex identity (or, better still, identities). Consequently, we must be careful in drawing conclusions about individuals on the basis of observations we make about groups. To say of a member of such a group that he or she will always exhibit a certain characteristic behavior is to offer a stereotype. Individuals can surprise us in many ways. The kind of group that sociolinguists have generally attempted to study is called the speech community. (See Patrick, 2002, for a general survey.) For purely theoretical purposes, some linguists have hypothesized the existence of an ‘ideal’ speech community. This is actually what Chomsky (1965, pp. 3– 4) proposes, his ‘completely homogeneous speech community’ (see p. 3). However, such a speech community cannot be our concern: it is a theoretical construct employed for a narrow purpose. Our speech communities, whatever they are, exist in a ‘real’ world. Consequently, we must try to find some alternative view of speech community, one helpful to investigations of language in society rather than necessitated by abstract linguistic theorizing. Lyons (1970, p. 326) offers a definition of what he calls a ‘real’ speech com- munity: ‘all the people who use a given language (or dialect).’ However, that really shifts the issue to making the definition of a language (or of a dialect) also the definition of a speech community. If, as we saw in chapter 2, it proves virtu- ally impossible to define language and dialect clearly and unambiguously, then we have achieved nothing. It is really quite easy to demonstrate that a speech community is not coterminous with a language: while the English language is spoken in many places throughout the world, we must certainly recognize that it is also spoken in a wide variety of ways, in speech communities that are almost entirely isolated from one another, e.g., in South Africa, in New Zealand, and among expatriates in China. Alternatively, a recognizably single speech community can employ more than one language: Switzerland, Canada, Papua New Guinea, many African states, and New York City. Furthermore, if speech communities are defined solely by their linguistic char- acteristics, we must acknowledge the inherent circularity of any such definition in that language itself is a communal possession. We must also acknowledge that using linguistic characteristics alone to determine what is or is not a speech com- munity has proved so far to be quite impossible because people do not necessarily feel any such direct relationship between linguistic characteristics A, B, C, and so on, and speech community X. What we can be sure of is that speakers do use linguistic characteristics to achieve group identity with, and group differentiation from, other speakers, but they use other characteristics as well: social, cultural,
will separate themselves from most Russians (but possibly not vice versa); and most Chinese will see themselves as members of the same community as all other Chinese, even though speakers of Cantonese or Hokkien might not be able to express that sense of community to a speaker of Mandarin or to each other except through their shared writing system. The single-language, or single-variety, criterion is also a very dubious one. Gumperz (1971, p. 101) points out that ‘there are no a priori grounds which force us to define speech communities so that all members speak the same language.’ As I observed in the previous chapter, many societies have existed and still exist in which bilingualism and multilingualism are normal. For example, early in the year 2000 London was judged to be the most ‘international’ of all cities in the world based on the number of different languages spoken there – over 300. It is such considerations as these which lead Gumperz (p. 101) to use the term linguistic community rather than speech community. He proceeds to define that term as follows:
a social group which may be either monolingual or multilingual, held together by frequency of social interaction patterns and set off from the surrounding areas by weaknesses in the lines of communication. Linguistic communities may consist of small groups bound together by face-to-face contact or may cover large regions, depending on the level of abstraction we wish to achieve.
In this definition, then, communities are defined partially through their rela- tionships with other communities. Internally, a community must have a certain social cohesiveness; externally, its members must find themselves cut off from other communities in certain ways. The factors that bring about cohesion and differentiation will vary considerably from occasion to occasion. Individuals will therefore shift their sense of community as different factors come into play. Such a definition is an extension of the one that Bloomfield (1933, p. 42) uses to open his chapter on speech communities: ‘a speech community is a group of people who interact by means of speech.’ The extension is provided by the insistence that a group or community is defined not only by what it is but by what it is not: the ‘cut-off’ criterion. Gumperz (1971, p. 114) offers another definition of the 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. Most groups of any permanence, be they small bands bounded by face-to-face contact, modern nations divisible into smaller subregions, or even occupational associations or neighborhood gangs, may be treated as speech communities, pro- vided they show linguistic peculiarities that warrant special study.
Not only must members of the speech community share a set of grammatical rules, but there must also be regular relationships between language use and social structure; i.e., there must be norms which may vary by sub-group and social setting. Gumperz adds (p. 115):
Wherever the relationships between language choice and rules of social appropri- ateness can be formalized, they allow us to group relevant linguistic forms into distinct dialects, styles, and occupational or other special parlances. The sociolin- guistic study of speech communities deals with the linguistic similarities and dif- ferences among these speech varieties.
Furthermore, ‘the speech varieties employed within a speech community form a system because they are related to a shared set of social norms’ (p. 116). Such norms, however, may overlap what we must regard as clear language boundaries. For example, 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 Sprachbund , ‘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.’ Hymes (1974, p. 47) disagrees with both Chomsky’s and Bloomfield’s defini- tions of a speech community. He claims that these simply reduce the notion of speech community to that of a language and, in effect, throw out ‘speech com- munity’ as a worthwhile concept. He points out that it is impossible to equate language and speech community when we lack a clear understanding of the nature of language. He insists that speech communities cannot be defined solely through the use of linguistic criteria (p. 123). The way in which people view the language they speak is also important, that is, how they evaluate accents; how they establish the fact that they speak one language rather than another; and how they maintain language boundaries. Moreover, rules for using a language may be just as important as feelings about the language itself. He cites the example of the Ngoni of Africa. Most Ngoni no longer speak their ancestral language but use the language of the people they conquered in Malawi. How- ever, they use that language in ways they have carried over from Ngoni, ways they maintain because they consider them to be essential to their continued identity as a separate people. Hymes adds that analogous situations may be observed among some native groups in North America: they use English in special ways to maintain their separate identities within the dominant English- speaking community. As we saw too in the previous chapter code-switching can be used to achieve a shared identity and delimit a group of speakers from all others. For Hymes, the concept of ‘speech community’ is a difficult one to grasp in its entirety, for it depends on how one defines ‘groups’ in society. He also dis- tinguishes (pp. 50–1) between participating in a speech community and being a fully fledged member of that community:
To participate in a speech community is not quite the same as to be a member of it. Here we encounter the limitation of any conception of speech community in terms of knowledge alone, even knowledge of patterns of speaking as well as of grammar, and of course, of any definition in terms of interaction alone. Just the matter of accent may erect a barrier between participation and membership in one case, although be ignored in another. Obviously membership in a community depends
- To show that very small changes in linguistic behavior can serve to disaffiliate you from other members of the same speech community, make deliberate adjustments in your speech on some occasion: that is, become more formal or less formal than seems to be required by the occasion; introduce technical or learned vocabulary when it is not called for; employ slang or coarse expressions; shift your accent (perhaps even to mimic another person); or switch to a distinct regional dialect. (Be careful!) What happens? How do such shifts affect your relationship to your listeners and any feelings you or they have about a common identity?
- In what respects do (or did) the following pairs of people belong to the same speech communities or to different ones: Presidents J. F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson; Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher; the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury; Professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle; Elizabeth II and John Lennon; Geoffrey Chaucer and George Bernard Shaw.
- Describe the linguistic uses of some bilinguals with whom you are familiar. When do they use each of the languages? If you are bilingual yourself, in what ways do you identify with people who show the same range of linguistic abilities? A different range?
- In what respects does the language which is characteristic of each of the following groups, if there is such a characteristic language, mark each group off as a separate speech community: adolescents; stockbrokers; women; linguists; air traffic controllers; priests; disk jockeys? How useful is the concept of ‘speech community’ in cases such as these?
- Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) and Trudgill (1986, pp. 85–6) distin- guish between focused and diffuse languages and communities, the main difference being the degree to which people agree about the shared features of the language or community. In this view the English public schools would be highly focused but Kingston, Jamaica, would be quite diffuse. Try to apply this distinction to other situations of which you are aware.
Intersecting Communities
The fact that people do use expressions such as New York speech , London speech , and South African speech indicates that they have some idea of how a ‘typical’ person from each place speaks, that is, of what it is like to be a member of a particular speech community somewhat loosely defined. Such a person may be said to be typical by virtue of observing the linguistic norms one associates with the particular place in question. But just what are these norms? I have already noted (p. 49) the work of Preston (1989, 1999, 2002), which shows that a person’s perceptions of the language characteristics of particular areas do not always accord with linguistic facts. Rosen (1980, pp. 56–7) has also indicated some of the problems you find in trying to call a city like London a speech community and in describing exactly what characterizes its speech. He says that such cities ‘cannot be thought of as linguistic patchwork maps, ghetto after
ghetto, not only because languages and dialects have no simple geographical distribution but also because interaction between them blurs whatever bound- aries might be drawn. Both a geographical model and a social class model would be false, though each could contribute to an understanding.’ In such places, ‘dialects and languages are beginning to influence each other. Urbanization is a great eroder of linguistic frontiers.’ The result is:
the creation of thousands of bilingual and to a certain extent bidialectal speakers on a scale and of a diversity unprecedented in our history. Which dialect of English they learn depends in the main on their social class position in this country. It is common practice to talk of the ‘target language’ of a second-language learner. In London it will be a moving target, though undoubtedly most by virtue of their social position will have as their chief model London working-class speech.
London is a community in some senses but not in others; however, with its 300 languages or more it is in no sense a single speech community (see Baker and Eversley, 2000). It is just too big and fragmented. On the other hand, if we say it must be a composite of small speech communities, we may not be any better off. Are these smaller communities geographical, social, ethnic, religious, or occupational in orientation? That is, how do any linguistic factors we might isolate relate to such social factors? Are the communities static or fluid? If they are static, how do they maintain themselves, and if they are fluid, what inferences must we draw concerning any concept we might have of ‘speech community’? Are their boundaries strong and clear or are they weak and permeable? Moreover, London is no different from most large cities anywhere in the world, a world which is increasingly a world of large cities, heterogeneously populated. We can easily see how difficult it is to relate the concept of ‘speech community’ directly to language or languages spoken and even to groups and norms if we refer back to the linguistic situation among the Tukano described in the previous chapter (p. 97). In that situation, which requires one to take as a marriage partner someone who speaks an entirely different language and furthermore requires the female to join the male’s household, multilingualism is endemic and normal. However, each residential community has its unique multilingual mix and no language equates in distribution to a specific residential community. Such a situation is not unique. Many other parts of the world would have some of the same multilingual characteristics; e.g., the Balkans, large areas of the Indian subcontinent, and Papua New Guinea. The actual equation of language to com- munity is perhaps most easily seen in certain modern states which have insisted that language be used to express some concept of ‘nationhood’ and, in doing so, have tried to standardize and promote a particular language (or particular languages) at the expense of competitors. But such solutions are not always lasting or uncontroversial, as we can see in countries such as Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, all of which have recently had to acknowledge in one way or another the presence of people who do not speak the standard variety (or varieties) but who are, nevertheless, very much part of the larger communities. Perhaps the concept of ‘speech community’ is less useful than it might be and we should return to the concept of ‘group’ as any set of individuals united
group or set of groups, or as a bundle of social characteristics, we need to focus on communities of practice.’ (See Meyerhoff, 2002, particularly pp. 527–30, for additional details.) It is such communities of practice that shape individuals, provide them with their identities, and often circumscribe what they can do. Eckert used this concept in her research (see p. 212). If there is no limit to the ways in which individuals can classify themselves and speakers must constantly create and recreate social identities for themselves, then it may be almost impossible to predict which group or community an individual will consider himself (or herself) to belong to at a particular moment. The group chosen to identify with will change according to situation: at one moment religion may be important; at another, regional origin; and at still another, perhaps membership in a particular profession or social class. An individual may also attempt to bond with others because all possess a set of characteristics, or even just a single characteristic, e.g., be of the same gender, or even because all lack a certain characteristic, e.g., not be of white skin color. The bonding can therefore be positive, as when the individuals share some feature or features, or negative, as when the individuals lack some feature or features. Language bonding appears to be no different. In one case command of a particular dialect or language may provide a bond and therefore a sense of community or solidarity with others; in another case the lack of such command may exclude you from a community of speakers, e.g., of RP users or speakers of Yoruba if all you speak is Brooklynese. But even sharing the same dialect might be of no signific- ance: if the circumstances require you to discuss astrophysics and you lack the language of astrophysics, you will not be able to enter the community of astrophysicists. Speakers of Yoruba may also find themselves with speakers of Japanese and Arabic within an English-speaking foreign-student speech com- munity at a North American or European university. Each individual therefore is a member of many different groups. It is in the best interests of most people to be able to identify themselves on one occasion as members of one group and on another as members of another group. Such groups may or may not overlap. One of the consequences of the intersecting identifications is, of course, linguistic variation: people do not speak alike, nor does any individual always speak in the same way on every occasion. The variation we see in language must partly reflect a need that people have to be seen as the same as certain other people on some occasions and as different from them on other occasions.
Discussion
- Try to determine in what respects the following countries are both single speech communities and complexes of intersecting speech communities: the United States, Singapore, the People’s Republic of China, Australia, Switzer- land, Haiti, and India.
- Explain the idea that a community or group must be defined partly in relation to some other community or group and to circumstances. Show how this helps to explain what is likely to happen in such situations as the following:
a. In a ‘jam’ in Turkey, you find someone who also speaks English. That someone is (i) a Turk who speaks it badly; (ii) a Turk who speaks it well; (iii) someone from another part of the English-speaking world who speaks Turkish well. b. While sightseeing by yourself in Nepal, you, from Dubuque, Iowa, meet someone from (i) Glasgow, (ii) Boston, (iii) Iowa, (iv) Dubuque. c. When stopped by a police officer for speeding in a large city, you hear the officer begin speaking to you in the strong regional accent that you yourself have. d. You overhear someone discussing you quite unfavorably in an ‘exotic’ language which you, by reason of foreign birth, happen to speak like a native.
Networks and Repertoires
Another way of viewing how an individual relates to other individuals in society is to ask what networks he or she participates in. That is, how and on what occasions does a specific individual A interact now with B, then with C, and then again with D? How intensive are the various relationships: does A interact more frequently with B than with C or D? How extensive is A’s relationship with B in the sense of how many other individuals interact with both A and B in whatever activity brings them together? If, in a situation in which A, B, C, D, and E are linked in a network, as in figure 5.1, are they all equally linked as in (1) in that illustration; strongly linked but with the link through A predominant, as in (2); weakly linked, with the link to A providing all the connections, as in (3); or, as in (4), is the link from A to E achieved through C? You are said to be involved in a dense network if the people you know and interact with also know and interact with one another. If they do not the net- work is a loose one. You are also said to be involved in a multiplex network if the people within it are tied together in more than one way, i.e., not just through work but also through other social activities. People who go to school together, marry each other’s siblings, and work and play together participate in dense multiplex networks. In England these are said to be found at the extremes of the social-class structure. Such networks indicate strong social cohesion, produce feelings of solidarity, and encourage individuals to identify with others within the network. On the other hand, middle-class networks are likely to be loose and simplex; therefore, social cohesion is reduced and there are weaker feelings of solidarity and identity. Dubois and Horvath (1999, p. 307) acknowledge that while the concept of social networks seems to be useful in studying language behavior in urban settings, its effectiveness in nonurban settings, in their case among English– French bilingual Cajuns in rural Louisiana, is not so clear. They say: ‘The notion of network is strongly conditioned by the effects of scale and place. Being a member of an open or closed network is quite different if you live in New
or literacy; and by personality characteristics. These are but some of the more obvious differences that affect individual variation in speech. An individual also has a speech repertoire ; that is, he or she controls a number of varieties of a language or of two or more languages. Quite often, many individuals will have virtually identical repertoires. In this case it may be possible to argue, as Platt and Platt (1975, p. 35) do, that ‘A speech repertoire is the range of linguistic varieties which the speaker has at his disposal and which he may appropriately use as a member of his speech community.’ The concept of ‘speech repertoire’ may be most useful when applied to indi- viduals rather than to groups. We can use it to describe the communicative competence of individual speakers. Each person will then have a distinctive speech repertoire. Since the Platts find both a community’s speech repertoire and an individual’s speech repertoire worthy of sociolinguistic consideration, they actually propose the following distinction (p. 36):
We... suggest the term speech repertoire for the repertoire of linguistic varieties utilized by a speech community which its speakers, as members of the community, may appropriately use, and the term verbal repertoire for the linguistic varieties which are at a particular speaker’s disposal.
In this view each individual has his or her own distinctive verbal repertoire and each speech community in which that person participates has its distinctive speech repertoire; in fact, one could argue that this repertoire is its defining feature. Focusing on the repertoires of individuals and specifically on the precise lin- guistic choices they make in well-defined circumstances does seem to offer us some hope of explaining how people use linguistic choices to bond themselves to others in very subtle ways. A speaker’s choice of a particular sound, word, or expression marks that speaker in some way. It can say ‘I am like you’ or ‘I am not like you.’ When the speaker also has some kind of range within which to choose, and that choice itself helps to define the occasion, then many different outcomes are possible. A particular choice may say ‘I am an X just like you’ or it may say ‘I am an X but you are a Y.’ It may even be possible that a particular choice may say ‘Up till now I have been an X but from now on you must regard me as a Y,’ as when, for example, someone pretends to be something he or she is not and then slips up. However, it also seems that it is not merely a simple matter of always choosing X rather than Y – for example, of never saying singin’ but always saying singing. Rather, it may be a matter of proportion: you will say singin’ a certain percent of the time and singing the rest of the time. In other words, the social bonding that results from the linguistic choices you make may depend on the quantity of certain linguistic characteristics as well as their quality. We have seen that ‘speech community’ may be an impossibly difficult concept to define. But in attempting to do so, we have also become aware that it may be just as difficult to characterize the speech of a single individual. Perhaps that second failure follows inevitably from the first. We should be very cautious therefore about definitive statements we may be tempted to make about how a
particular individual speaks, the classic concept of ‘idiolect.’ Just what kinds of data should you collect? How much? In what circumstances? And what kind of claims can you make? We will need to find answers to questions such as these before we can proceed very far. Any attempt to study how even a single individual speaks in a rather limited set of circumstances is likely to convince us rather quickly that language is rather ‘messy’ stuff. For certain theoretical reasons it might be desirable to ignore a lot of that mess, as Chomsky insists that we do; but it would be unwise for sociolinguists always to do so since that is, in one sense, what sociolinguistics is all about: trying to work out either the social significance of various uses of language or the linguistic significance of various social factors. The following three chapters will address some of these issues.
Discussion
- Try to construct a network of your linguistic relationships in an attempt to represent the different varieties of language you use and the relative propor- tions of use among those varieties. What are some of the difficulties you encounter in doing so? (The latter will probably have to do with taking into account external factors such as place, occasion, participants, and so on. A multi-dimensional network may seem necessary, something next to impos- sible to represent on a two-dimensional surface.)
- Blom and Gumperz (1972), Gal (1978, 1979), and Milroy (1980, 1987a) all use the concept of ‘network’ in their investigations. What similarities and differences do you find in their uses?
- Keep a log of your linguistic usage over a day. Record such factors as the time spent talking versus listening, reading versus writing, conversing, lecturing, gossiping, asking and answering, complaining, requesting, stating, deliberately being silent, singing, humming, being formal and being informal, and so on. What are some of the difficulties you encounter in trying to do this kind of thing? (Again, one of them is likely to be the difficulty of devising a multi-dimensional system of classification.)
- Most of us know someone who has a repertoire of linguistic abilities that we admire, possibly envy. Try to specify some of these abilities that you yourself seem to lack. Why does the other have these abilities and you do not?
Further Reading
Two basic sources are Gumperz (1971) and Hymes (1974). Scherer and Giles (1979) is a useful collection of articles on social markers in speech. See Patrick (2002) for speech communities, Milroy (2002) for social networks, and Meyerhoff (2002) for communities of practice.
