Definitions of Speech Community and Author’s Views |Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics|

In spite of the fact that the speech community is something that is difficult to define accurately but the study of the speech community is central to the understanding of human language. The kind of group that sociolinguists have generally attempted to study is called the speech community. (Patrick,2002) A speech community is defined as a group of people who speak the same language and share the same words and grammar rules. For instance, English language speakers throughout the world. Speech communities may be huge locales like an urban area with a common, distinct accent (think of a Boston with its dropped r,s) or little units like families and companions (think of a nickname for sibling). They help people characterized themselves as individuals and community members. The study of speech communities has therefore interested linguists for some time, at least since Leonard Bloomfield wrote a chapter on speech communities in his book Language(1933:ch.3). For absolutely hypothetical purposes, the existence of an “ideal” speech has been hypothesized by a few linguists This is actually what Chomsky (1965, pp.3-4) proposes, his ‘completely homogeneous speech community’. Such a speech community cannot be our concern in any case: it is a hypothetical development utilized for a contracted purpose. Our speech communities, whatever they are, exist in a genuine world. Subsequently, we must attempt to discover a few alternative views to the speech community, one supportive to the examination of language in society instead of required by unique linguistic theorizing. However, there have been impressive confusions and disagreements over exactly what a speech community is, as the taking after overview appears.

(1) John Lyons (1970,p.326) defines what he calls a real “real” speech community:

According to this definition, speech communities may overlap (where there are bilingual individuals) and require not to have any social or cultural unity. It is conceivable to delimit speech communities in this sense as it was to the extent that it is conceivable to delimit languages and dialects without referring to the community that speaks them(R.A.Hudsen,1996). It is truly very simple to illustrate that a speech community isn’t coterminous with a dialect: whereas the English dialect is spoken in numerous places all through the world, we must certainly recognize that it is moreover spoken in a wide mixture of ways, in speech communities that are almost entirely disconnected from one another, e.g., in South Africa, in New Zealand, and among expatriates in China. We must also acknowledge that using linguistic characteristics alone to determine what is or is not a speech community has proved so far to be quite impossible because people do not necessarily feel any such direct relationship between linguistic characteristics A, B, C, and so on, and speech community X.

(2) A more complex definition is given by Charles Hockett(1958:8):

Here the basis of communication inside the community is included so that if two communities both spoke the same dialect but have no interaction at all they would count as distinctive speech communities. According to this definition, interaction is very important if two communities do not contact(either directly or indirectly)  each other then they will be considered as two separate speech communities although they speak the same dialect of a language. For example; if people of Pakistan and India speak the same dialect of the English language but they interact neither directly nor indirectly then they will be taken as two different speech communities.

(3) another definition shifts the stress completely from shared dialect to communication. A simple form of it was given by Leonard Bloomfield(1933:42):