Speech communities
Speech communities form when people speak to the same people frequently,
such as, at work or at school or when playing sport or socialising. Certain
patterns of speech may form between these speakers that makes them feel like
a group, and different from other groups. They will have a lot in common
and will not always need to explain the things they talk about because they
share a lot of information already (eg, things that happen at school or at
work or in the family). Sometimes groups come together for a special purpose,
eg, to work on a project, to play on a team, and they form communities of
practice where for a short time the same shared knowledge and familiarity
exist as in a speech community.
Networks
We all belong to more than one
speech community and will often change the way we speak and what we talk
about when we move from one to another. When people move from one group to
another they create links between the networks.
Even though groups form networks and identify with each other in terms of
how they speak and how often they talk to each other, we are still all individuals
with different influences on the way we speak.
- We differ in terms of social class, regional origin, occupation, religion, sex and ethnicity, etc.
- We also differ in terms of how talkative we are, how much we like to read or write and in our personality characteristics.
- Because of this we each have our own speech repertoire. In fact we most likely have more than one repertoire which we use with different speech communities.
- We might choose a particular repertoire of speech when we are with our friends and a different one when we are talking to our family. We might have yet another one for when we are talking to teachers.
- Sometimes we might not want to be considered part of a particular group of speakers, so we might choose not to use the same repertoire as they are using.
- Sometimes we might deliberately exclude people because of their speech repertoire, for example, it might be one that we think is too snobbish.
When we change the way we speak, we change our repertoire by altering our speech in several different ways:
- If we use different words we change our register;
- If we speak more or less formally or carefully we change our style;
- If we use different sounds or pronunciation we change our accent;
- If we use different words with different meanings and change our sentences then we may have changed to a different dialect.