SOCIOLINGUISTICS

SPEECH COMMUNITIES
Lecturer by

Mrs. Sushy Patanduk S.Pd

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E
A
T
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By :

GROUP 5
1. WINDIA LIMBU .M
2. PERADIKA SARAMBU

3. YULIANUS LIMBONG .A
4. RUTH RANTE .L
5. ALFRIANI DAMITA .U

213 112 173

213 112 191
213 112 167
211 112 197
211 112 286

ENGLISH EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY OF

INDONESIA TORAJA ACADEMIC YEAR 2015/2016

PREFACE
First at all, give thanks for Gods love and grace for us. Thanks to God for helping our
gruop and give our chance to finish this assignment timely. And we would like to say thank
you to Mrs.Sushy Patanduk S.Pd as the lecturer that always teaches us and give much
knowledge about how to practice English well.
This assignment is the one of English task that composed of SPEECH
COMMUNITIES. We realized this assignment is not perfect. But we hope it can be useful
for us. Critics and suggestion is needed here to make this assignment be better. Hopefully we
as a student in Christian University of Indonesia Toraja can work more professional by using
English as the second language whatever we done. Thank you.

MAKALE,10MARCH 2015
WRITER

GRUOP 5

CONTENT
1. SPEECH COMMUNITIES
Language is a tool of human communication that is used either orally or in writing,
which consists of the use of words in a structured and conventional. While
Community is a group of people who live in the same place or have the characters or the
same interests. Communities can form community organizations, organizational groups, or
gangs.
In the socio-linguistic science, has no doubt that the language and the community are the
same thing but can not be separated. A group of people who use the same language can make
their own community and a community with members who have diverse backgrounds can
make their own language. Typically, each community has a language of their own and only
members of the community who understand the meaning. Usually the words to use or create a
community that depends on the way of thinking and background of members of the
community itself. How to communicate with a group of fellow never be the same with the
other communities. In the science of socio-linguistics, language community is often referred
to as a speech community.
Sometimes, when a group of organizations or gangs make language, norms, and regulations
of their own, and they apply to members of the group / gang of their own, then others outside
the group are prohibited from interfering and forbidden to judge or give a negative
assessment of speech community made by the group. In addition to showing the identity and
existence of a group / gang, speech community in the socio-linguistic viewpoint is also used
to clicking Excluding outsiders of affairs or specific group conversation.
The most famous example is the speech community "Black English" or "African-American
Vernacular English (AAVE) created by the blacks in the United States. The blacks (AfroAmerican) suffered a long while America still adopts slavery and discrimination against black
people in all fields. To perform such resistance, they created something unique of their own
creations to demonstrate the existence of the black community who are often discriminated
against by whites in America. One of those cultural creations Afro-American characteristic in
the form of the language is "Black English". Language "Black English" is contrary to English
common standards in terms of vocab and grammar. "Black English" many distinctive artwork
contained in the Afro-American that rap music. People are just as good as white people
udelnya judge that "Black English" creation of the Afro-American as a low-class English
vocab filled not polite and not air-grammar. Is "Black English" Afro-American creation that
does not comply with the general standard of English was wrong ??? Of course NOT
WRONG. In the socio-linguistic viewpoint, negative assessments were cast by people whites
against "Black English" creation of the Afro-American people could not be accepted. Wong
was the Afro-American creates rules, norms, and language "Black English" to members of

their own community anyway, why white people as outsiders meddling nyinyirin community
norms, rules, and language that made Afro community American?
Definitions of Linguists
Noam Chomsky
concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely
homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is
unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations,
distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors.
William Labov
The speech community is not defined by any marked agreement in the use of
language elements, so much as by participation in a set of shared norms.
John Gumperz
Any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by
means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by
significant differences in language usage
Each person speaks their own typical way according to its place of origin or
specific speech community.
Rosen claims that cities cannot be thought of as a linguistic patchwork maps,
ghetto after ghetto because: 1. languages and dialects have no simple
geographical distribution and 2. because interaction between them blurs
whatever boundaries might be drawn .
Urbanization is a great eroder of linguistic frontiers.

Dialects and languages are beginning to influence each other.

London is a community in some sences but not in others. Neither a single
speech community even though it has 300 languages or more . it's too big and
fragmented .
It is to difficult to relate of speech community directly to language or
languages spoken.
The concept of SC is less useful than what is expected and we should be
instead referring to group as any set of individuals united for a common end.
A person can belong to many different groups at any given time depending on
the particular ends in view.
Laura is living in Gotemborg Sweden . married to a Swedish man she and Per
speak mostly English and Swedish switching and mixing both from time to
time.She had to learn Swedish with an intense course in Sweden. She is an
immigrant from Costa Rica. she has an accent, she doesnt speak Swedish that
well. She uses Swedish in the hospital, as well as English switching from time
to time and from one group to another.

Each member of a community has a repertoire of social identities that are each
one in a given context is associated with a number of nonverbal and verbal
forms of expression.
There is not a clear way on how to define how individuals can classify
themselves and speakers are creating and recreating social identities. So, it is
impossible to predict the group or community he or she will consider itself to
belong in a particular moment. This group will change according to situation .

2.

NETWORK AND REPERTOIRES

Another way of viewing how an individual relates to other individuals in society is to

ask what networks he or she participates in. That is, how and on what occasion does a
specific individual A interact now with B, then with C and than again with D? How intensive
are the various relationships: does A interact more frequently with B then with C or D? How
intensive is As relationship with B in the sence of how many other individuals interact with
both A and B in what eve activity brings them togethers? If, in a situation in with
A,B,C,D,and E are linked in a network,as in figure 5.1, are they all equally linked as in (1) in
that illustration strongly linked but with the link through A predominant,as in (2) ; weakly
linked,with the link to A providing all the connection, as in (3); as in(4),is the link from A to
E achived through C ?.
You are said to be involved in a dense network if the people you know and interact
with also know and interact with one another. If they do not the networks is a loose one. You
are also said to be involved in a multiplex network if the people within it are tied together in
more than one way,i.e., not just through work also through other social activities. People who
go to school together,marry each others siblings,and work and play together participate in
dense multiplex networks. In England these are said to be found at the extremes of the socialclass structure. Such network indicate strong social cohesion,produce feelings of solidarity,
and encourage individuals to identify with others within the network. on the other
hand,middle-class networks are likely to be loose and simplex; therefore,social cohesion is
reduced and there are weaker feelings of solidarity and identity. Much linguistic behavior
seems explicable in terms of network structure and we will see in chapters 7 and 8 how
valuable the concept of social network is when consider matters of language variation and
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 psycological 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.
an individual also as speech repertoire; that is, he or she controls a number of varieties ofa
language or of two or more language. Quite often,many individuals will have virtually

idential repertories. In this case it maybe possible to argue,as Platt and Platt (1975,p.35) do,
that 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.
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 competence of individual speakers.
each person will then have a distinctive speech reportoire. Since the Platta find both a
communitys speech repertoire and an individuals speech repertoire worthy of sociolinguistic
consideration,they actually propose the following distinction(p. 36).
We. . . . suggest the tern speech repertoire for the repertoire of linguistic varieties utilized
by a speech community which its speakers, as members of community, may appropriately
use, and the term verbal repertoire for the linguistic varieties which are at particular speakers
disposal.
in this view each individual has his or her own distinctive verbal repertore 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 individual and specifically on the precise linguistic choices
they make in well-defined circumstance does seem to offer us some hope of explaining how
people use linguistic choices to bond themselves other in very subtle ways. A speakers
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 an 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 pretend to be something her or she is not and then slips up . however ,it also seems
that it is not merely a simple metter of always choosing X rether than Y- for example ,of
never saying singin but always saying singing . rather,it may be a metter of proportion: you
will say singi a certain precent of the time and singing the rest of the time.in other words,
the social bonding that results from the linguistic choice you make may depend on the
quantity of certain linguistic characteristics as well as their quality.

we have seen that speech comunity may be an impossibly difficult concept difficult c 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 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 circumstance? and what
kinds 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 singel individual speaks in a rather
limited set of circumstance is likely to convince us rather quickly that language is rather
messy stuff. for certain theoretical reason it might be desirable to ignore a lot of that
mess,as chomsky insists that we do; but it would be unwise for sociolinguistic is all about:
trying to work out either the social significance of the various bits and pieces of language or
the linguistic significance of vorious bits and pieces of society. the following three chapter
will address some of

CONCLUSION

It is important to remember that group is a relative concept with respect to speech

community. Also that an individual belongs to various speech communities, at the same time,
but he/she will identify with only one of them.
There are many definitions for speech community which are all different: too simple or to
complex
Each individual is a member of many different groups. People get interested to be
identified with one groups members today and with others the next. They may or not overlap.
One of the consequences is linguistic variation: people dont speak alike.
Neither in the same way on every occasion. People have a need to be seen as the same as
certain other people on some occasions and as different from them on others.

REFERENCES
Yule, G 2006, 'the study of language', third edition, Cambridge University press.

 Gumperz, John. 1968. The Speech Community. in Duranti, Alessandro (ed.)

Linguistic Anthropology: A reader 1:66-73.
Gumperz, John. 1964. Linguistic and Social Interaction in Two Communities. in
Blount, Benjamin. (ed.) Language, Culture and Society. 14:283-299.
Chomsky, Noam (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns . Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press .