Locating Variation in Speech - Speech Communities and Repertoires
Gabriel BĂRBULEŢ
Universitatea « 1 Decembrie 1918 » din Alba Iulia
The present paper deals with the speech communities and the repertoires. The speech community as
a linguistic issue is thoroughly analyzed and detailed. The notion of the speech community has been
one of the key concepts in sociolinguistics since its beginning. The speech community is presented
as the abstract 'space' studied in sociolinguistics, the location in which the patterned variations in
selection from the available repertoire takes place.
The non-hyphenated fields of linguistics like phonology, semantics, and syntax focus on the
language system ideally abstracted from all social context. Psycholinguistics deals with the individual speaker's acquisition and use of language, and relates this to mental processes. Sociolinguistics
is concerned with language in situ and in vivo, alive in its geographical and social setting and space.
What this space is like, we now consider. To start with, because our main interest is in social
matters, we will deal with social space, and look for the location of varieties of speech within
definable social units.
Some of the units with which we are concerned are already familiar and established social
groupings. Thus, we can study the language of families, neighbourhoods, villages, cities, states,
countries, or regions. However, for theory building and planning observation, we need a more
flexible and abstract concept, provided by the notion of a speech community.
For general linguistics, a speech community is all the people who speak a single language
(like English or French or Amharic) and so share notions of what is same or different in phonology
or grammar. This would include any group of people, wherever they might be, and however remote
might be the possibility of their ever wanting or being able to communicate with each other, all
using the; same language. The notion is preserved in such a concept as ‘la francophonie', the
French-speaking world, and it can serve as the basic slogan for political co-operation. Underlying it
is the idea of a group of people who could, if they wanted, speak to each other.
The notion of the speech community has been one of the key concepts in sociolinguistics
since its beginning, and yet at the same time remains one of the least satisfactory. The speech
community is the locus of most sociolinguistic and anthropological-linguistic research, indeed all
linguistic research that is accountable to a body of naturally-occurring speech or signed data. It
represents the social boundaries within which analysts locate, and seek to describe and account for,
language variation and change, ways of speaking, and patterns of choice among elements in a
linguistic repertoire. It is thus on a par with other basic notions such as ‘language’, ‘dialect’ or
‘grammar’ as a primary object of description and theorizing.
Early attempts to grapple with the speech community date back to the Prague School notions
of Sprechbund or ‘speech bond’, focused on “shared ways of speaking which go beyond language
boundaries”, and Sprachbund or ‘language bond’, involving “relatedness at the level of linguistic
form” (Romaine 1994:23) – both of which emphasize the production of speech itself over
265
perception or attitudes to it. All efforts since share “the concern for a definition of speech
community as a real group of people who share something about the way in which they use
language” (Duranti 1997:72), though they differ significantly on the details.
As linguistics has expanded steadily away from the narrow concerns of the structuralists, the
role of production and system – the actual linguistic features, and their arrangement – in defining
the speech community has gradually shrunk, and that of the social evaluation of speech has grown.
We can clarify the contrast by framing the questions:
1) How important is it that members of the same speech community actually speak alike?
2) How important is it that members of the same speech community share similar attitudes toeach
other’s speech?
These questions, useful in outlining the changing conception of the speech community in
sociolinguistics, can also usefully be asked in any empirical investigation of a social group’s
language.
One of the most accurate definitions of the speech community would be that offered by
William Labov (1972). His research has undoubtedly been the most influential one since it has
directly inspired a methodology used in scores or hundreds of empirical studies:
(3) “The speech community is defined by … participation in a set of shared norms …
[which] may be observed in overt types of evaluative behavior, and [in] the uniformity of abstract
patterns of variation” (Labov 1972:120-1)
In fact, Labov’s was the first definition to match the emphasis on linguistic production with
a focus on perception and social evaluation, an insight which has been followed (sometimes to
extremes) in all subsequent efforts.
LePage and Tabouret-Keller (1985), for example, take the perceptions and motivations of
the individual speaker as primary; they are still interested, but ultimately unable, to understand how
“individuals… can be considered members of linguistic communities” (LePage and Tabouret-Keller
1985:158). Pit Corder (1973) goes farther:
(4) “A speech community is made up of individuals who regard themselves as speaking
the same language; it need have no other defining attributes.” (Corder, 1973: 53)
Hudson (1993), who makes a general argument that language is located in the individual
rather than at the community level, ultimately rejects the whole concept, claiming that “Our
sociolinguistic world is not organised in terms of objective ‘speech communities’ ” (Hudson
1993:29). He argues, following LePage and Tabouret-Keller (1985) to a logical extreme, that since
the role of individual speaker perceptions and ‘acts of identity’ is paramount, and since each
speaker is likely to differ from many or all others, there can be no objective basis to any
delimitation of a speech community. Consequently, sociolinguistic research ought not to take such
an entity as a legitimate object of analysis, and should instead stick to “the micro level of the
individual person and the individual linguistic item” (Hudson, 1996:229).
Equally radically, if more constructively, Duranti (1997) too recommends that we give up
on the speech community as “an already constituted object of inquiry”, but instead take it as “a
point of view of analysis” (Duranti 1997:82); his definition is “the product of the communicative
activities engaged in by a given group of people”).
Sociolinguists, however, find it generally more fruitful to focus on the language practices of
a group of people who do in fact have the opportunity to interact and who, it often turns out, share
not just a single language but a repertoire of languages or varieties. For the sociolinguist, the
speech community is a complex interlocking network of communication whose members share
knowledge about and attitudes towards the language use patterns of others as well as themselves.
266
There is no theoretical limitation on the location and size of a speech community, which is in
practice defined by its sharing a set of language varieties (its repertoire) and a set of norms for using
them.
The idea that the members of a speech community share norms about the selection of
varieties is important. Though they might not all know and use each of the varieties, they recognize
the conditions under which other members of the community believe that it is appropriate to use
each of them. Londoners recognize Cockney and Mayfair varieties of English though they may
themselves use neither. A small social network (such as regular patrons of a coffee shop) forms a
speech community, and so does a large metropolis or a country, a region, or a communication
network (like the Internet). In each case, the goal of sociolinguistic study of such a community is to
relate the significant language varieties to the significant social groups and situations.
Smaller networks—groups of people who communicate with each other regularly—also
contain consistent patterns. One might, for instance, study the linguistic differences that make up
the communicative repertoire in a modern office or research centre equipped with computers and
telephones and faxes. A researcher with a problem might send off a quick e-mail question to a
colleague in the next room, or ask the same question by telephone. If the answer is complicated, it
might be handled by sending (by fax or computer) a copy of a previously written paper. When the
exchanges become too involved, the colleagues might arrange (by phone or e-mail) a face-to-face
meeting. Each of these communications media will involve different stylistic choices, and the
variants can be considered as making up the repertoire. In the same way, international organizations
might, like the European Community, have a formal policy governing choice of language from the
repertoire available.
The speech community is, therefore, the abstract 'space' studied in sociolinguistics, the
location in which the patterned variations in selection from the available repertoire takes place.
Bibliography:
Corder, S. Pit. (1973). Introducing applied linguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. (Cambridge textbooks in linguistics.) Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hudson, R. A. (1993) Sociolinguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge-New York.
Labov, W. (1966) The Social Stratification of English in New York City Washington, DC: Center
for Applied Linguistics.
Le Page, R. B. and Andreé Tabouret-Keller (1985) Acts of Identity: Creole-based approaches to
language and ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
267