Speech community

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a more or less discrete group of people who use language in a unique and mutually accepted way among themselves.

Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct social groups like high school students or hip hop fans, or even tight-knit groups like families and friends. In addition, online and other mediated communities, such as Wikipedia, often constitute speech communities. Speech communities, especially online, often develop terms that would be of little use to most people, but which is of value to the people involved. For instance, IRC develops such words as kick or op, while Wikipedia has stubs

A person can (and almost always does) belong to more than one speech community. For example, a gay Jewish waiter would likely speak and be spoken to differently when interacting with gay peers, Jewish peers, or his co-workers. And if he found himself in a situation with a variety of in-group and/or out-group peers, he would likely modify his speech to appeal to speakers of all the speech communities represented at that moment.

(A variation on this concept is code-switching, which is usually observed among speakers of two or more languages who swtich between them based on the content or pragmatics of their conversation.)