Subject Lecturer
Sociolinguistics Rizki
Amelia, M.Pd
SPEECH
COMMUNITY
Group 6
Evi Ratna Sari
11214200926
ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTEMENT V C
FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND TEACHER TRAINING
STATE ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF SULTAN SYARIF
KASIM RIAU
2014 – 2015
PREFACE
Assalamu'alaikum
warahmatullahi wabarakatuh
Praise
be to Allah SWT. Who
has given us the ease in order to finish this paper. Without His help writer
may not be able to finish well. May prayers and peace be poured right to the
beloved Prophet Muhammad SAW.
Writer also thanks to Miss. Rizki
Amelia, M.Pd who
has been guiding writer in order to understand about sociolinguistics especially in speech community.
The
paper is organized so that readers can expand knowledge about "speech community ", in which writer present it based on observations from a variety of sources.
This paper collated by the writer with a variety of obstacles. Whether it will come
from writer and it comes from outside. But with patience and especially the
help of Allah SWT. At last this paper can be resolved.
This paper contains about 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. It means that, this paper contains about a set of imdividuals who share a knowledge of what is the appropriate conduct and interpretation of speech. These individuals also share understanding of at least one language so that they may communicate each other.
Hopefully, this paper can provide wider knowledge to the reader although this paper has advantages and disadvantages. Writer needs criticism and constructive suggestions from readers to build and to input these working paper writer fullness increase.
Pekanbaru, 14 October 2014
The writer
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of problem
Sociolingustics is the study between
language and society. It means that, it
is the study of interelationships of language and social structure,
linguistics variation and attitudes toward language. It is any set of
linguistics form which pattern according to social factors.
The study of sociolinguistics also focuses
on the language variations that emerge in the society. For example, the
way of how to speak of a group of students is different from the way of a
group of bus drivers.
Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all
aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context,
on the way language is used.
Sociolinguistics divided into
two:
I.
Micro-sociolinguistics
The study of language in
relation to society deals with small group of people in certain community.
Example: meeting.
II.
macro-sociolinguistics
The study of language related
to how the society treats the language.
Sociolinguistics is the study of language use within or among
groups of speakers. What are groups?
‘Group’ is a difficult concept to define but one we must try to grasp. For our
purposes, a group must have at least two members but there is really no upper
limit to group membership. People can group together for one or more reasons:
social, religious, political, cultural, familial, vocational, avocational, etc.We
must also be aware that the groups we refer to in various research studies are
groups we have created for the purposes of our research using this or that set
of factors. They are useful and necessary constructs but we would be unwise to
forget that each such group comprises a set of unique individuals each with a
complex identity (or, better still, identities). Consequently, we must be
careful in drawing conclusions about individuals on the basis of observations
we make about groups. To say of a member of such a group that he or she will
always exhibit a certain characteristic behavior is to offer a stereotype.
Individuals can surprise us in many ways. The kind of group that sociolinguists
have generally attempted to study is called the speech community.
1.2. The formulation of the problems:
a. What is a speech
community?
b. What is intersecting community?
c. What is network in speech community?
d. What is repertoire in speech community?
1.3. Purpose:
a. To understand what a speech
community is
b. To understand who part of speech community is
c. To understand how to use language as speech community
d. To understand what intersecting community is
e. To understand what network and repertoire are
f. As complete of Sociolinguistic Subject
1.4. Research methodology:
In evolving
the design of working paper, the writer took the reference from some books and an internet.
Chapter 2
SPEECH COMMUNITY
2.1 Definition of Speech Community
Speech community is something which is difficult to define
precisely. We always have to ask what does this term get us. Chomsky's (formal
linguistics) notion of an ideal speech community: 'completely homogenous'. But
we know in general that this is a lots of variation exists within a group of
speakers.
There
are many definition of speech community from various linguists , namely:
1. Lyons (1970):
Speech community is all people who use a give language or dialect.
2. Labov (1972):
Speech community is Participation in a set of shared norms; these
norms may be observed in overt types of evaluative behavior, and by the
uniformity of abstract patterns of variation which are invariant in respect to
particular levels of usage
3. Gumperz (1971)
Speech community is A social group which may be either monolingual or
multilingual, held together by frequency of social interaction and set
off from the surrounding areas by weaknesses
4. Patrick (2002)
speech community is the kind
of group that sociolinguists have generally attempted to study .
Base
on opinion of linguist, we can conclude that a speech community is a group of
speakers who share a language and patterns of language use. It means that, 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
An example of a speech
community is the group of English language speakers throughout the World.
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.
Exactly how to define speech community is debated in the literature.
Definitions of speech community tend to involve varying degrees of emphasis on
the following:
- Shared community membership
- Shared linguistic communication
Early definitions have
tended to see speech communities as bounded and localized groups of people who
live together and come to share the same linguistic norms because they belong
to the same local community. It has also been assumed that within a community a
homogeneous set of norms should exist. These assumptions have been challenged
by later scholarship that have demonstrated that individuals generally
participate in various speech communities simultaneously and at different times
in their lives each of which has a different norms that they tend to share only
partially, communities may be de-localized and unbounded rather than local, and
they often comprise different sub-communities with differing speech norms. With
the recognition of the fact that speakers actively use language to construct
and manipulate social identities by signalling membership in particular speech
communities, the idea of the bounded speech community with homogeneous speech
norms has become largely abandoned for a model based on the speech community as
a fluid community of practice.
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.
2.2 Intersecting Communities
To understand intercultural interaction, we must first
recognize the role of communication in the process. Comunication is our ability
to share our ideas and feelings that is the basis of all human contact. When we are communicating, we should know who
our speech communities are. It means that, we need to use a language which is
appropriate with people who are invited to comunicate. An ability to fit our language to speech community is
called intersecting communities. One of the consequences of the 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 other
occasions.
Several points of view have been
taken to analyze and classify the language varieties. For example , people may
be classified according to the user of the language. In line with this
varieties can be further devided into two types, namely the individual and the
societal varieties.
In this definition, communities are defined partially through
their relationships
with other communities. Internally, a community must have a certain social
cohesiveness; externally, its members must find themselves cut off from other
communities in certain ways. The factors that bring about cohesion and
differentiation will vary considerably from occasion to occasion. Individuals
will therefore shift their sense of community as different factors come into
play. Such a definition is an extension of the one that Bloomfield (1933, p.
42) uses to open his chapter on speech communities: ‘a speech community is a
group of people who interact by means of speech.
Not only must members of
the speech community share a set of grammatical rules, but there must also be
regular relationships between language use and social structure. Wherever the
relationships between language choice and rules of social appropriateness can
be formalized, they allow us to group relevant linguistic forms into distinct
dialects, styles, and occupational or other special parlances. The
sociolinguistic study of speech communities deals with the linguistic
similarities and differences among these speech varieties.
2.3 Networks and Repertoires
2.3.1
Networks
Social
network (SN)
approaches are based not on shared language use or shared evaluations but on the social
ties people engage in, such as with kin, close
friends, colleagues and neighbors. SN measures actual connections
in a “community” whose members know each other, and
assesses the extent to which those members
are differentially grounded in that community. SC approaches, however, do not insist that members actually
know each other or interact regularly and
make few claims (beyond nativeness) about the extent
to which members are integrated socially into communal life. The term SN has been used in two different ways, namely:
1. Metaphorical
Referring to groups that are most likely to have common social ties
(such as “peer network;” e.g., Gal, 1987).
2. Methodological
focusing on ways of defining and measuring the structure of the “community;” the strength or
centrality of relevant types of network is quantified
and used to account for language behavior in the community Milroy and
Gordon (2003, p. 119) point out that the ‘concepts of network and community of
practice are closely related, and the differences between them are chiefly
method and focus.
Network analysis typically deals
with structural and content properties of the ties that constitute egocentric
personal networks but cannot address the issues of how and where linguistic
variants are employed to construct local social meanings. Rather, it is
concerned with how informal social groups support local norms or facilitate
linguistic change.’ 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, gender, nationality, and
ethnicity; by psychological differences such as particular kinds of linguistic
skills, e.g., verbality or literacy; and by personality characteristics. These
are but some of the more obvious differences that affect individual variation
in speech. In sociolinguistic research, these factors have often been distilled down to two key
measures of network strength, namely:
1. Multiplexity (e.g., a link with someone who is a
neighbor, a workmate and a friend represents a multiplex social network tie as
opposed to with someone who is only tied in a network through one type of
social connection – a uniplex network link).
2. Density (if the close ties in your network are also
ties of each other, the network is considered to be denser than if your ties do
not know each other).
2.3.2
Repertoire
According to Platt (1975, p. 35) ‘ 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.’ An individual also 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.
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 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):
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. 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 various uses of language or the
linguistic significance of various social factors.
Chapter 3
CONCLUSION
Speach
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.
When we are
communicating, we should know who our speech communities are. It means that, we
need to use a language which is appropriate with people who are invited to
comunicate. An ability to fit our
language to speech community is called intersecting communities.
Social
network (SN)
approaches are based not on shared language use or shared evaluations but on the social
ties people engage in, such as with kin, close
friends, colleagues and neighbors. The term SN has been used in two different
ways, namely:
1. Metaphorical
2. Methodological
In sociolinguistic research, these factors have often been
distilled down to two key measures of network strength,
namely:
1. Multiplexity
2.
Density
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.
REFERENCE
Amelia, Rizki. 2013. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics.
Pekanbaru: Benteng Media
Ball, Martin J. 2005. Clinical Sociolinguistics.
Victoria: Blackwell Publishing
Jendra, Madeiwan Indrawan. 2010. Sociolinguistics The Study of
Societies’ Languages. Denpasar: Graha Ilmu
Wardhaugh , Ronald. 2006. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics.
Victoria: Blackwell Publishing
http://Speech Communities - Intersecting Communities
- Networks and by emine can on Prezi.htm
http:// Speech community - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia.htm
http:// Introduction to General Linguistics _
SOCIOLINGUISTICS.htm
http://The Speech Community.htm
http://Speech Community - Definition and Examples.htm