Defining the Speech Community

Nancy C. Dorian
Chapter 2 Defining the Speech Community
1982, in Sociolinguistic Variation in Speech Communities

There is a community of fisherfolk in Scotland who are bilingual in East Sutherland Gaelic and English. According to Gumperz they would belong to two speech communities. Dorian notices that the picture is complicated by low-proficiency bilinguals identified as part of the speech community by fluent bilinguals. The low-proficiency speakers understood everything spoken in Gaelic, including jokes, but some almost never spoke in Gaelic. They also understood sociolinguistic cues that the “linguist-guest”, and fluent speaker of Gaelic, often missed. One speaker considered herself relatively fluent, but under testing, was proven to have low-proficiency; this hadn’t stopped her, her entire life, form inclusion in the Gaelic speech community.