Talk:Speech community

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Ephemeralives.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 09:59, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

My edit
I've mostly done cleanup on this article. I removed the "wikipedia as a speech community" section entirely, as it violates Avoid self-references, and I frankly think it looks very unprofessional. I've moved and expanded one of the sentences that was formerly in that section to the end of the lead section, and replaced the other mention of wikipedia by a link to internet forum. I also copyedited parts of the article. Graham talk 10:27, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm concerned that this article confuses the notion of speech community with community of practice. I think it needs a good overhaul. 71.134.237.139 09:20, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Confusion + hasty generalizations
I agree that this article confuses several constructs in sociolinguistics.

However, I'm somewhat troubled by the oversimplification under the "Definition" heading. The existence of a certain social demographic group does not require that members of such group have 1. distinct and exclusive speech patterns of their own and 2. that they use or choose to use such speech patterns. In fact, I find the poor example of belonging to more than one speech community to be a product of stereotyping (over-generalizing) more than anything else. Furthermore, the addition of "likely" is proof of conjecture. The passage reads as follows:


 * "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. 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."

I think the notions of face (Goffman), topic, and speech convergence would be more relevant here. -- CJ Withers (talk) 20:42, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

No examples
This article has no examples whatsoever of this phenomenon except in the middle referring to AAVE (a dialect) and at the very end where it relates it ambiguously to "registers" among professionals and "stylistic differences" between communities. It's unclear to me on a cold read if a stylistic difference represents a speech community or if 'speech community' refers to different languages or dialects - languages obviously being much broader populations than small variations in terminology. Skateboarders have some terminology they share, but for instance, does that represent a speech community if an 'ollie' is an 'ollie' in Brazil and the US, even if they're otherwise speaking English and Portuguese?

I understand there are disagreements about where to draw the line, but some sort of idea about where a selection of opinions puts it among linguists/anthropologists (based on the disagreement stated) would be extremely helpful. Eagleon (talk) 16:42, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm adding an example, I hope it will help. --Jotamar (talk) 17:48, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Adoption of the concept
"The adoption of the concept of the 'speech community' as a unit of linguistic analysis emerged in the 1960s."

This is absurdly ahistorical. Bloomfield (1933) Chapter 3 "Speech-Communities". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bn (talk • contribs) 16:57, 7 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Perhaps we could rewrite the text along these lines: Although the concept of "speech community" is quite old, its definition as a unit of linguistic analysis was particularly disputed in the 1960s. Other ideas? --Jotamar (talk) 20:26, 9 May 2022 (UTC)