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23 - The speech community and beyond

Language and the nature of the social aggregate

from Part IV - Community and social life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2014

By
Shaylih Muehlmann
Edited by
N. J. Enfield ,
Paul Kockelman  and
Jack Sidnell
N. J. Enfield
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute
Paul Kockelman
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Jack Sidnell
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Summary

This chapter focuses on three particular concepts, community, culture, and the public. It examines some of the early and polemical work on the speech community. The chapter traces its theoretical and political implications out to work in practice theory, on the one hand, and issues of language and broader-scale imaginings of groups on the other. Linguistic anthropologists share with sociolinguists the concern for a notion of a speech community as a real group of people who share something about the way in which they use language. The chapter focuses on the concept of speech community as it developed in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. It describes the notion of the speech community from sociolinguistics to practice theory, in more general terms the concept can also be traced to a wider historical and philosophical tradition in various branches of language research.

Keywords

linguistic anthropologysocial interactionlanguageconversation across culturescomparative interaction
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology , pp. 577 - 598
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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