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.

Speech COmmunities

in An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics
By Ronald Wardhaugh
1998 Chapter 5 ‘Speech Comunities”
Speech communities are impossible to define precisely, but the term is still useful to sociolinguists.
The English language is spoken by variety of speech communities, and Switzerland is one speech community with multiple languages. Speech comm.. cannot be defined in linguistic terms.
Hindis separate themselves from speakers of Urdu, although it is the same lang.; most Chinese consider every other Chinese part of their community, although they may only be able to communicate by the written language.
“Each individual … is a member of many different speech communities.” People may switch back and forth between types of speech (jargon, dialect, standard, another lang.) during the course of the day or even switch while speaking an utterance.
Networks: in England, people of lower class and upper class are said to have dense multiplex networks, but middle-class people are said to have loose simplex networks.