A speech community is a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations regarding language. There are so many speech communities that you can be in hundreds in your life time, and at one point in time you can overlap and be experiencing several communities in one interaction.
I read an article called "Christian Speech" from families.com, which spoke on this exact topic. The article talked about how Christians should be different in the way they use language than the way the world uses language. There are certain things that are held from Christian's speech as well as certain things that should be present in their language. The article spoke more on the way Christians should speak to be different to strengthen the speech community. It said that Christians should cleanse their speech of curse words and using God's name in vain. It also stated that our speech should be full of love and encouragement.
The is a prime example of a speech community, because this group (Christians as a whole) share the same ideals and values in the way they use language in everyday life. If someone who was not part of the Christian speech community came into a group of interacting Christians, they might be confused. The Christians may use words or phrases that they understand but others may have never heard. There are terms that correlate with each speech community. For example, Christians might use the phrase "born-again" or talk about different activities within the church like "AWANA", and if you were not familiar with that language and that social group, you would not understand the meanings of those words and phrases. This is the same in any speech community. This is the same for white groups, black groups, Indian groups, UW-Parkside students, etc. Each of this mentioned groups has a specific way of speaking and has specific language that they use that is particular to them only.
It is easy to become wrapped up in many different speech communities in one setting. For example, if I am talking to a girl from my church about what we are going to do this weekend, I am using language from my Christian speech community, as well as the white language and the female language. If a black man walked into our conversation, he would have a hard time understanding us, because he is not apart of our speech communities.
Do you think the different speech communities really draws lines in our society? Is it harmful to have these speech communities, because they keep us separate instead of bringing us together?
You raise an interesting question, Holly. In your example, it seems like different speech communities really do draw lines within our society and in a sense, create separation instead of integration. I don't know if it is necessarily a harmful thing to have speech communities. I think that speech communities are inevitable and have always been a part of our society. You could make any group with similarities a speech community. For instance, a group of students working on a project for class or a group of boys that play on the same basketball team can both be examples of different speech communities. When you bring up race, it does sound a bit destructive in our attempts at creating equality. However, we can use these speech communities to study the relationships between people. All in all, I can think of multiple reasons for why speech communities could be both, harmful and helpful to our society.
ReplyDeleteHolly- Intriguing question. I agree with Stephanie, but I am going to stir things up. If you think about it, in Chicago there are many different “miniature towns”, for example, China town, Mexican district, Italian district, and more located in Chicago but have different speech communities. I am sure there are more cities that have multiple districts too. However, the point is, these “miniature towns” do not co-exists, they exists within their own segregated towns. With this example, I can see where it could be harmful to have many speech communities, especially since their in the same city, because each of these districts are not trying to integrate with one another they are trying to keep their life styles the way it was before they came to America. This then, doesn’t help the people in those little districts to get to know everyone or anything America has to offer.
ReplyDeleteI liked your blog on Christian speech communities. I believe that there are times when having different speech communities do keep societies divided. I remember a time when I went to eat at a Waffle House in Georgia. I was ordering a waffle, but I had a very difficult time understanding the waitress because of her accent. Eventually, I became better at understanding the Southern accent. Different speech communities do draw lines in society because of the several differences that do exists between speech communities. I do hope that someday these differences disappear eventually and better communication to develop between different speech communities.
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