SOCIOLINGUISTICS : Speech Communities

SPEECH COMMUNITIES

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. These individuals also share the understanding of at least one language so that they may communicate with each other.

Membership in a speech community includes local knowledge of the way language choice, variation, and discourse represents generation, occupation, politics, social relationships, identity, etc

 Example: in transgender communities, they use particular vocabulary such as “akika” to change the word “aku” and “begindang” to change the word “begitu”. When they making transaction, “berapose” that means “berapa” or to say “benar” by saying “ember”

In Speech communities, there are:

a.       Intersecting communities: language that used from communities such as like we know people is baliness, batakness, sundaness by looking their word, accent, intonation and also dialect.

b.      Network and repertoire:  it is show that a person can be part of various speech communities by an interaction in network and repertoires is various language variotion that have got from network.

Factors of social communities:

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.

Questions:

1.      Is slang include of speech communities?

Answer: Yes, it is. Because slang is created from communities and it expand to be an informal language for some country that they often use slang in their communities.

2.      Is it possible one speech communities used by the other communities?

Answer: yes, it is possible. But it can be a good or bad word, if the user use it correctly and know that meaning.

3.      Why speech communities exist?

Answer: to make the people in community are enjoyable to interact each other and to  improve their language abilities that used in social activities.