Speech communities may be large regions like an urban area with a common, distinct accent think of boston with its dropped rs or small units. Carrington has aptly dubbed caribbean sociolinguistic complexes cscs, 1992a. Speech community the widest context of verbal interaction for sociolinguistic research is usually taken to be the speech community. Chomskys formal linguistics notion of an ideal speech community. Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a distinct group of people who use language in a unique and mutually accepted way among themselves. Linguistics sociolinguistic variation and change miriam meyerhoff encyclopedia of life support systems eolss speakers use one pronunciation for a word, and sometimes they use another without changing its meaning. The speech community spcom, a core concept in empirical linguistics, is the intersection of many principal problems in sociolinguistic theory and method. As well as having social norms in which they share through actions. A definition of speech community in sociolinguistics thoughtco. Traditionally, stylistic constraints have been analysed according to labovs attention to speech model labov 1966, 2001. Indeed, the taxonomic enterprise itself has languished or perhaps been abandoned. Speech is not simply sounds that come from a persons mouth. But at the same time, sociolinguistics has always been more than just a technical activity, and speech community has been especially hard to tie down as a.
The spoken arabic of mascara is regarded as a bedouin dialect. Samy alims book is a balanced blend of hip hop linguistics, ethnography, and advocacy. The speech community sociolinguistic taxonomy is not the language but the speech community p. For example, a more formal variety will be used in an interview whereas an informal register, a vernacular style will be used amongst friends. Bloomfields conception of the homogeneous speech community rep resented the canon in linguistic anthropology until noam chomsky. Keep in mind though, that this is an ideal simplicity. Pdf sociolinguistic variation in an arabic speech community. The study of speech communities has interested linguists for a long time. Chosen sample consisted of 30 male and 20 female yorubaenglish bilingual respondents falling within the age brackets of 25 to 40 years. The social categories that influence speech gender, ethnicity, social class, age, etc. Lyster 1994 defines the concept of sociolinguistic competence. Sometimes speakers use different word orders without that difference contributing anything substantive to what the sentence. Our increasingly globalized society is composed of numerous speech communities. An ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of styleshifting in a black american speech community.
Sociolinguistic fieldworks the most systematic grammar of a dialect resides in the vernacular language of the speech community labov 1972. Developing sociolinguistic competence through intercultural. Raad shakir abdulhassan, raheem jabir mohammadlanguage variation in nassiriyah speech community. A sociolinguistic profile of the gallo speech community. The speech community is the locus of most sociolinguistic and anthropologicallinguistic research, indeed all linguistic research that is accountable to a body of naturallyoccurring speech or signed data. In rural ternate, chabacano is more stable in terms of intergenerational transmission and the proportion of speakers to the overall community. Speech communities may be large regions like an urban area with a common, distinct accent think of boston with its dropped rs or small units like families and friends think of a nickname for a sibling.
Base on opinion of linguist, we can conclude that a speech community is a group of speakers who share a language and patterns of language use. Speech community is something which is difficult to define precisely. Stanford, edu abstract american quantitative sociolinguistics has drawn substantiall on data y from the african american speech communit for its descriptivey. Contributions from the speech community to sociolinguistics include the. Pdf on jan 1, 1997, otto santa ana and others published typologizing the sociolinguistic speech community find, read and cite all the research you need on researchgate. A speech community refers to a community of speakers that speak the. The initial objectives in this work are to observe, analyse and discuss aspects of language variation in this area. Language shift is the process by which a speech community in a contact situation i.
Let us say that a society is any group of people who are drawn together for a certain purpose or purposes. It is challenging to provide an account of methods associated with sociolinguistic fieldwork, as the field of sociolinguistics is extremely heterogeneous. A definition of speech community in sociolinguistics. A sociolinguistic study european academic research vol. Pdf typologizing the sociolinguistic speech community. The difficulty referred to above, namely that peoples linguistic. Iii, issue 5 august 2015 5502 introduction language is regarded as one of the most interesting social phenomena, though some linguists consider it as a form of. Linguistics defines a speech community through many ways. Definitions of speech community tend to involve varying degrees. In most sociolinguistic and anthropologicallinguistic research, the speech community has always been the focus. Ayeomoni 2006 studied the style of language use in childhood in yoruba speech community.
It means that, the definition of a speech community is a group of people who speak the same language and share the same dialect, words, and grammar rules of a language as a standard. The kind of group that sociolinguists attempt to study is called speech community. One particular aspect of sociolinguistics is the concept of the speech community. Sociolinguistic change in a garifuna community in belize abstract language shift is the process by which a speech community in a contact situation i. Nov 19, 20 intersecting communities people do use expressions indicates that they have some idea of how a typical. To be considered part of a speech community, one must have a communicative competence. This thesis aims to build on the work of scholars such as these by focusing on the language use and attitudes of the gallo speech community. Instructors of international and intercultural communication can use the sociolinguistic concept of speech community and its concomitant six aspects to organize their curricula and classroom activities efficiently and productively. Speech community is hard to define it because there is not a true definition of it. A speech community is a group of people who share a set of linguistic norms and expectations regarding the use of language. All speech communities have a set of grammatical rules, phonology, syntax, and lexicons. The rapid anonymous surveys short surveys investigating one linguistic feature from many people in a short space of time subsequent sociolinguistic interviews and analysis in a relevant community.
Nov 23, 2010 speech communities are formed by language and social behaviors. Sociolinguistic variation and attitudes towards language. Reasons and contexts to switch and mix english code by. Speech community is a term in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology used to describe a group of people who share the same language, speech characteristics, and ways of interpreting communication. The concept of speech community has a long and chequered history in. Sociolinguistic fieldwork is at the core of this article. But we know in general that this is a lots of variation exists within a group of speakers.
Exactly how to define speech community is debated in the literature. Sociolinguistic change in a garifuna community in belize. These factors influence the language of the speakers. A sociolinguistic study of ghazaouet speech community phonological, morphological and lexical variation dissertation submitted to the department of letters and. Speech community is a term in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology used to describe a group of people who share the same language. It is a concept mostly associated with sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics. Raymond hickey language and society page 4 of 37 in casual speech the attention paid is less, 3 degree of formality, determined by the nature of the interview, this can vary depending on the way informants react to the interviewer and the situations they are placed in.