sociolinguistics speech community

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