Speech Communities

In “Speech Communities” by Paul Roberts, he uses examples throughout the text that helps give his audience a better understanding of what a speech community actually is and how they are formed. One example Roberts gives in the Speech Communities of the Child. In this example, Roberts clarifies that one of the most effective speech community is that of a child’s family. For example, it is more common for a child to learn any kind of language from his family first. This is because it is more common for children to imitate what they hear at such a young age.

On October 22, 2014, Raffaella Zanuttini’s essay, “Our Language Prejudices Don’t Make No Sense,” was published in Pacific Standard magazine. This work was written to draw attention to the false assumptions made about different varieties of the English language. Zanuttini starts her essay by considering, “There are some things you just don’t say in a polite society” (173). With this statement, she is referring to the ridicule made on different varieties of language. Zanuttini offers a few examples of judgements people often make, negative concord demonstrating one of them. Negative concord is a part of the Russian language and many others, but in today’s English, those who speak with negative concord occupy a low position on the socioeconomic scale. Zanuttini then introduces an argument in which people believe the language they speak is inferior. The English language has many recipes and according to Zanuttini, these different variations can be associated with age, ethnic or social identity, and geographical location. Although, there is a prestige language that should be used for business matters. As a final remark, she describes how different varieties of the same language should be viewed. Zanuttini indicates different dialects are like bread. No bread is better than any other, but for certain purposes, different breads should be used. Just like bread, no variation of language should be judged.

Each social group can be stereotypical against each other with the use of their own language by

Each of the authors would disagree on how social change will impact the language within the United States, and whether or not people should encourage the change or try and stop it altogether. Each article however, does agree on the fact that language will always be an ever-changing part in

Language is a very important and significant part of individuals’ life. It is considered as one of the best device of social behavior. Language is a means with the help of which people communicate and send a social message to one another. But language does have very special characteristics according to which it changes and very depending on many factors. According to the researchers there are no two people who speak identically. Their languages vary as per their geographic location, age, gender, ethnicity, social background etc. many a time, it is observed that even the members from same family speak differently due to differences in their location ( Biber & Conrad, 2014). For example, in my neighborhood, there is a difference in the ways of

Language plays a significant role in defining who we are. It is a method of communication in a structured and conventional way. “Language reinforces feelings of social superiority or inferiority; it creates insiders and outsiders” (p. 242) states Robert MacNeil (2012) in his article “English Belongs to Everybody”.

Have you ever thought about how you talk to people? How the way you communicate with people changes depending on who you are talking to and where you are? A speech community is a group of people who share a similar vocabulary and similar rules of language. These communities are often found in schools, places of work, homes, churches, and even on the internet. A speech community occurs wherever there are people. A very interesting speech community in my life happens at the place I work. It's a restaurant called Subzero.

Do you ever think about the way you speak and why? Well, Paul Robert does an excellent job explaining why people use the dialect they use in Speech Communities. He discusses that people change their use of language throughout their lives to conform to either society or to what kind of person they want to be, or to just conform to who they need to be at a particular moment, in which I agree. People’s choice of language, including myself, are affected by many of their surroundings, such as where they live and grow up at, their peers, and a person’s work place.

SPECIFIC PURPOSE: By the end of my speech, my audience will know the history of Walt Disney, his invention of Disney World, and how his invention has impacted people.

Language attitudes, which include people’s perception about the language variety in their own community and language varieties in other communities, has been one of the crucial topics in sociolinguistics since 1960s.

This community has great potentials that are part of the discourse community. For instance, people from the hotel industry have common goals, they work for the purpose to improve their selves, their knowledge and be able to provide a better information about the hotel to the customer. They are require to learn and know more about their company , its history and chain if any; these common goals lead the employee to perform and develop a better job to acquire a higher level position. As a linguistic John Swales says, “Discourse community will lead us to be more knowable about our career and to have a better perspective of our desire goals”. By saying so we can be more informed about our career and we can determine if that is want we want or if we can follow a different career or goal.

Other forms of the English language are developed from speech communities with an intention, for efficiency and to show inclusion, and to exclude others. It also helps to convey a specific identity of the speaker, with the use of syntactic and phonological differences from Standard English. These modifications form non-standard dialects, transferring the speaker’s cultural background and language to provide a better perception and reflection of identity. The falling intonation accompanied with interrogatives in the Asian ethnolect, such as ‘Gravy?’, is the opposite of the rising intonation used for the same purpose by Australians, and can quickly cause conflict between the two communities due to the missing benchmark in language. Pronoun deletion in ‘No like’ (‘I don’t like it’) is a feature of many ethnolects (Greek, Aboriginal English), and is differing from the Standard, yet still helps to get the message across. Ethnolects develop from Standard English, and helps to express a user’s identity through their language use and in-group solidarity within the speech community.

Talking about “dialects”, a term often mentioned along is “standard language”. When being brought into comparison with “dialect”, “standard language” usually serves as a legitimate variant with the highest level of excellence (Bex & Watts, 1999). Though positive in nature, standardization - the procedure of standardizing a language – often raises heated controversy because of its consequences on not only linguistics field but also the society. In the second part of the essay, I will focus on the disadvantages of language standardization.

We live in a generation where losing your phone is worse than losing your virginity.

Among the most important concepts to emerge are those relating to dialects and language standards. Sociolinguists have documented the presence of dialects in every language. These dialects, all of which are legitimate, are associated with educational, economic, social and historical conditions. Hence, even if an individual scrupulously studies all the possible dictionaries of a random language, he would still be somewhat of a stranger to that language since he is unaware of all the dialectal changes.