Speech Community
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A.
Background
of The Study
The study of sociolinguistic
variation examines the relation between social
identity and ways of speaking. The analysis of style in speech is central to
this field because it varies not only between speakers, but in individual speakers
as they move from one style to another. Studying these variations in language
not only reveals a great deal about speakers’ strategies with respect to
variables such as social class, gender, ethnicity and age, it also affords us
the opportunity to observe linguistic change in progress.
Any discussion of
the relationship between language and society, or of the various functions of
language in society, should begin with some attempt to define each of these
terms. Let us say that a society is any group of people who are drawn
together for a certain purpose or purposes. By such a definition ‘society’
becomes a very comprehensive concept, but we will soon see how useful such a
comprehensive view is because of the very different kinds of societies we must
consider in the course of the various discussions that follow. We may attempt
an equally comprehensive definition of language: a language is what the
members of a particular society speak. However, as we will see, speech in almost
any society can take many very different forms, and just what forms we should
choose to discuss when we attempt to describe the language of a society may
prove to be a contentious matter.
Sometimes too a society may be pluralingual;
that is, many speakers may use more than one language, however we define
language. We should also note that our definitions of language and society are
not independent: the definition of language includes in it a reference to
society. Every branch
of linguistics that is concerned with representative samples of a population
that takes individual speakers or experimental subjects as typical members of a
group. Language
is both an individual possession and a social possession. We would expect,
therefore, that individual would behave linguistically like other individualist:
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 the respect to be members of the
same speech community, a term
probably derived form the German Sprachgemeinschaft.
Indeed, much work in sociolinguistic is based on the assumption that it is
possible to use the concept of ‘speech community’ without much difficulty.
As we will see, that assumption is
hardly warranted. Just as it is difficult to difine such terms as language, dialect, and variety, it
is also difficult to difine speech
community, and for many of the same reason. That difficuly, however, will
not prevent us from using the term: the concept may prove to be useful in sociolinguistic
work in spite of a certain ‘fuzziness’ as to its precise characteristics. It
may be so even if we decide that a speech characteristics are of interest and
can be described in a coherent manner.
B. Purpose
of Study
Writer
makes this paper for several purposes, there are the purposes;
1.
To get more explanation about speech comunity.
2. To make the student
of English education study program can
understand language
variation and change itself.
C.
Problem
Identification
Based on the background of study, we will identify
the problem is what is the meaning of speech community and all about it.
CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION
A.
Speech
Community
Language is both an individual possession and
social possession. Speech community is hard to define it because there is not a
true definition of it. The kind of group that sociolinguists attempt to study
is called Speech Community. In one hand, Speech Community has many definitions
which explained by Linguist. It is better to know about definition itself
before we are going to the next explanation of speech community.
Some
linguist define the meaning of the speech community and we
can use those as the knowledge and basic of speech
community. Based on the free encyclopedia, speech
community is a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations
regarding the use of language[1]. According to Aniruddha Kumar, 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[2]. 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. Members of speech communities will often
develop slang or
jargon to serve the group's special purposes and priorities.
On the other hand Lyons (1970), for example
defines speech community as people who use a given language. Taylor (1979)
defines speech community as people categorized in a social organization
speaking the same language. Gumperz (1971) uses the term linguistic community
in place of speech community, which means a group of people who regularly and
frequently interact by means of verbal signs. Bloomfield (1933) defines it as a
group of people who interact by means of speech. Platt (1975) uses the term
speech repertoire that is a range of linguistic varieties which a speaker uses
as a member of his speech community[3].
Based on the explanation
above speech community is a
regionally or socially defined social group the members of which share a
language variety (spoken or signed) furthermore speech
community is a group of speakers who share a language and patterns of language
use. Members of the community speak more often with each other than they do
with members outside the community. This pattern of behavior is known as
communicative isolation. Communicative isolation is increased by social,
cultural, economic, and geographical factors. Consequently, over time the speech community
develops characteristics of language and language use that are different from
those of another community.
A speech community comes to share
a specific set of norms for language use through living and interacting
together, and speech communities may therefore emerge among all groups that
interact frequently and share certain norms and ideologies. Such groups can be
villages, countries, political or professional communities, communities with
shared interests, hobbies, or lifestyles, or even just groups of friends.
Speech communities may share both particular sets of vocabulary and grammatical
conventions, as well as speech styles and genres, and also norms for how and
when to speak in particular ways.
In addition, online and other mediated communities, such as many internet
forums, often constitute speech communities.
Members of speech communities will
often develop slang or jargon to serve
the group's special purposes and priorities members of the same speech community should share linguistic norms. That is, they share understanding, values and attitudes about language varieties present in their community. While the exact
definition of speech
community is debated,
there is a broad consensus that the concept is immensely useful, if not crucial, for the
study of language variation and change
B. Intersecting
Communities
The
fact that people do use expressions such as javanesse speech, sundas speech, and
balis 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?
Preston's work (1989), which shows that a
person's perceptions of the language characteristics of particular areas do
not always accord with
linguistic facts[4].
Rosen has also indicated some of the problems 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 boundaries 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 erode 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.
Perhaps
the concept of 'speech community' is less useful than it might be, and a more
productive approach requires us to ask how individuals relate to society -
specifically, how they relate through the language, languages, or varieties
they employ. However, this approach will result in a very different view of
what a speech community or any other group is. A community or group will be any
set of individuals united for a common end, that end being quite distinct from
ends pursued by other groups. Consequently, a person may belong at any one time
to many different groups or communities depending on the particular ends in
view.
Each
individual therefore is a member of many different speech communities. It is the
best interests of most people to be able to identify themselves on one n as
members of one community and on another as members of another. These
communities may or may not overlap. One of the consequences of such
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 still other occasions.
C.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?
1 2 D 3
C 4
Figure 5.1. Simple network relationships
1. 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.
2. If
they do not the network is a loose one.
3. You
are also said to be involved in a multiplex network if the people within
it are tied together in more than one way
It
is quite apparent that no two individuals are exactly alike in their linguistic
capabilities, just as no two social situations are exactly alike. People are
separated from one another by fine gradations of social class, regional
origin, and occupation; by factors such as religion, sex, nationality, and
ethnicity; by psychological differences such as particular kinds of linguistic
skills, e.g., verbality or literacy; and by characteristics of personality.
These are but some of the more obvious differences that affect individual
variation in speech.
Any
individual 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 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[5].
The
concept of speech repertoire may be most useful when applied to individuals
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.[6]
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 linguistic
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 the various bits and pieces of language or the linguistic
significance of the various bits and pieces of society.
CHAPTER
III
CONCLUSION
Based
on the expalantion above we get the principle unit of analysis in the
ethnography of community is the speech community. A speech community is a group
of speakers who share a language and patterns of language use. Members of the
community speak more often with each other than they do with members outside
the community. This pattern of behavior is known as communicative isolation.
Communicative isolation is increased by social, cultural, economic, and
geographical factors. Consequently, over time the speech community develops
characteristics of language and language use that are different from those of
another community
Did you copy your article from an inroduction to sociolinguistics book?
BalasHapusyes he is.
BalasHapus