What are speech communities?

“We’ve Got to Work on Your Accent and Vocabulary”: Characterization through Verbal Style in Clueless Jennifer O’Meara (bio) In her introduction to this “In Focus,” Melissa Lenos notes that Quote-Along screenings of Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 2005) are well attended on both sides of the Atlantic. It follows that when audiences derive additional pleasure from speaking words back to the screen, the dialogue must contain notable properties in the first place. Upon Clueless’s release, praise was frequently leveled at its use of language. In his review for Cineaste, Tom Doherty noted that “almost all the humor in [the film] is verbal—a patter of quotable epigrams, asides, and ironic by-play.”1 Similarly, reviewer Peter Stack stated, “One of the curious delights of this film is how verbal it is.”2 He praises Heckerling for capturing “the essence of teen-speak . . . so well that you feel as if you’re eavesdropping.” In fact, before writing the screenplay, Heckerling spent considerable time around her characters’ real-life counterparts; she watched plays and debates at Beverly Hills High School, attended skateboarding contests, and loitered beside groups of girl in clothing stores.3 This partly explains why comedy scholar Andrew Horton describes Heckerling as having a “razor-sharp ear for teen talk and slang.”4 He elaborated: “Heckerling has made “‘As if ’ and ‘Hello!’ . . . everyday phrases for millions of viewers. Everyone has their favorite lines and exchanges [from the movie].”5 Despite this, Clueless’s dialogue has received little in-depth analysis. The accompanying essays here go some way to address this by referencing the film’s verbal style from a variety of angles: Kyra Hunting identifies how the film’s linguistics flow “across the franchise,” [End Page 138] including books and a CD-ROM, and in her essay on the use of makeover, Alice Leppert makes an interesting comparison between the tone of Cher’s (Alicia Silver-stone) condescending, didactic, and urgent comments about Tai (Brittany Murphy) and that of teen magazines. My essay focuses on the significance of verbal dynamics to the narrative as a whole and to characterization in particular. As well as outlining the characters’ notably different communication styles, I consider Heckerling’s skillful incorporation of irony and slang. Cher’s Overstated Speech Cher’s verbal style is generally marked by hyperbole, as captured through the constant exaggeration with adverbs: she is “brutally rebuffed” by a teacher, whom she later plots to make “sublimely happy,” in turn making the other students “utterly grateful.” She also emphasizes with adjectives; her life is “a royal mess,” and her father works on “a gazillion depositions.” Roz Kaveney rightly identifies totally as Cher’s “standard emphatic.”6 Totally in general goes where completely would, with characters totally “revived,” “paused,” or “choked.” Heckerling also incorporates way as a substitute for really throughout. Cher has “a way normal life,” insults are “way harsh,” and quotes can be “way famous.” Even negatives are phrased with emphasis, as when Cher describes the damage done to her shoes as “so not fixable.” But the dialogue is also self-aware and reflexive; late in the film when Cher describes the cartoon series The Ren and Stimpy Show as “way existential,” Josh (Paul Rudd) asks if she has any idea what she is actually saying. Arguably, he asks this on the audience’s behalf, and Cher’s reply (“No, why? Do I sound like I do?”) encourages us to reconsider how much of what she says has been purely for effect. Although Cher has a rich vocabulary, including terms like capricious and replenish, Heckerling uses her to represent a tendency for young people to verbally stall. Cher opens her two-minute debate in class with content-free warm-up phrases such as “So, OK, like,” and she continues to use up her time with “but it’s like” and “so I was like.” Meaningless phrases such as “and all” further contribute to Cher’s excessive speech. As she tells Josh, “I can drive and all . . . and since you’re not doing anything and all.” Cher’s verbal style is also marked by ironic contrasts between current slang and historical references, as when she compares Tai to “those...

The way people use language determines and (or) reflects their experience in their social context; the use of everyday language becomes a lens through which people behave and see their world and at other time it is the social practices that influence certain choices of language used by community members. For that reason research on how languages affect women’s image in different speech communities is highly needed for the sake of saving women’s face. This brought to the attention the concept of language and gender in applied linguistics whose focus is on how language use and labelling is associated with gender differences. And those language forms that show gender bias are known as sexist expressions. Drawing on the above scenario, the present study explores sexist expressions in Nyakyusa language using data collected from four Nyakyusa speaking people as key informants through mobile phone interviews. Data were analysed thematically in which I generated themes from coded and categorised data. Findings show that Nyakyusa exhibits elements of sexism through five forms of sexist expressions namely referential gender, social gender, lexical gender, proverbs and idioms and agreements. The researcher calls for creation of awareness among Nyakyusa speech communities for reformation of sexist expressions.

The three basic premises upon which the following discussion of diglossia is founded may be stated at the very outset. First, diglossia, in its original and most theoretically productive sense, is a dramatic instance of the apparently universal opposition between formal and informal language use. Second, the situational differentiation of registers of the same language is not of the same order as the asymmetric functional allocation of distinct languages within the same speech community, but rather differs from the latter in terms of its sociogenesis and evolutionary course of development. Third, and following from the first two premises, the phenomenon of diglossia is more fruitfully investigated from the perspective of a theory of formal language use and formal social behavior generally than from the perspective of a theory of language contact and societal bilingualism. Two largely independent views of the notion of formality predominate among students of language use in social context, the first an anthropological, or sociocultural, view, and the second a discourse-functional, or psychopragmatic, view. From the anthropological standpoint, formality of discourse is typically viewed in terms of ‘a prevailing affective tone,’ such as seriousness, politeness, or respect (Irvine 1984:212). Within the more psycholinguistic framework of discourse pragmatics, however, formal-informal variation in linguistic form is understood in terms of the interaction between the physical and psychological exigencies of the communicative context, on the one hand, and the cognitive mechanisms engaged in the planning, production, and processing of discourse, on the other (Given 1979:105-06).

This paper argues that the framework of Community of Practice is beneficial for an understanding of the linguistic practices that international courts and tribunals employ in their interpretative approaches. Other than the frameworks of the social network, the speech community, and the epistemic community, the framework of Community of Practice can be said to allow for a more critical assessment of the social context in which international courts and tribunals function. Such an assessment is crucial in that it is in that social context that interpretative approaches can be said to take form and in return shape the social institutions that international courts and tribunals comprise. That is, the framework of Community of Practice entails the notion that any form of meaning and its subsequent reifications, including, actual language use, are continually negotiated communally as a result of social interaction and, hence, shape the social constellations in which such interaction takes place accordingly.

Educators’ understanding and use of language is particularly relevant in relation to historically marginalized groups, such as people with disabilities. However, previous research has suggested that teacher education programs do not adequately address the concepts of language and disability. Content acquisition podcasts (CAPs) may provide them with knowledge related to language and disability. The purposes of this investigation were to determine how a CAP impacts undergraduate students’ understanding of language with regards to people with disabilities, and examine undergraduate students’ perceptions towards CAPs as a learning tool. Qualitative analyses, a pairwise t‐test, and a Pearson’s correlation analysis were used to determine CAP’s impact on 43 preservice educators. Results revealed that the CAP significantly increased the participants’ knowledge and that the participants had positive perceptions towards the CAP. Findings from focus group discussions indicated a number of themes emerged in relation to both language use regarding people with disabilities and CAPs. Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic Language allows for one to build and understand the world around them, as well as reflects how one views others. The language educators use when referring to and addressing students with disabilities creates a unique environment that can impact students with disabilities’ self‐esteem, and provides a model for typically developing students on how to interact with their peers with disabilities. Podcasts have been noted as an educational phenomenon, with social and “media‐rich” features that exemplify the uniqueness and broad appeal of online learning. What this paper adds Although there has been a great deal of research with regards to content acquisition podcasts (CAPs), most of the research has focused on topics that have singular answers, rather than focusing on complex issues that are often contextual, such as language use. This study utilized focus groups to better understand undergraduate students’ perceptions of CAPs. To the best of the investigators’ knowledge, is the first CAP study to do so. Implications for practice and/or policy This investigation suggests that CAPs can be used to teach ambiguous and complex information, such as language usage and disability, to preservice teachers. CAPs that are able to teach complex issues are a promising tool, as this would allow faculty members to positively impact preservice teachers’ instructional skills and enable CAPs to be used to prepare preservice teachers to build meaningful relationship with their students and create a positive learning environment.

There seems to be nothing remarkable about the interaction between two interlocutors who have never been in contact with each other. These persons are able to understand themselves in contact situations because most times, a common language of communication is known that can sustain the exchange for the time necessary. However, when such exchange is between individuals with some level of contact or familiarity, the concept of speech community comes into play. The concept is useful but may be problematic at times and one cannot avoid applying this idea when trying to make sense of the process that takes place in the conversation, specifically a causal conversation. The aim of this sociolinguistic study is to explain how individuals are able to build social history, construct interactional talk, maintain relations with each other and reinforce solidarity from a two hour audio recorded conversation (ARC) between an ethnic Indian and a Nigerian in Marylebone, London using interactional socio-linguistic and conversation analytic. By doing so, the concept of a speech community as well as how a group can be identified as being members of a community is understood. A particular focus is paid to such linguistic features as the register of conversation, turn taking, discourse variation, phonological variation and grammatical variation characteristic of London, Nigerian and Indian English observed in the speech of the participants and how these features function to build and maintain relations.
 Keywords: Speech community, Casual conversation, Linguistic features, Sociolinguistics, ARC

This article provides an overall review on the methodology of Department Store Surveys (DSS), which refers to sociolinguistic surveys taking place in department stores in urban speech communities accompanied with unobtrusive observation techniques. DSS originated in Labov’s pioneering study on the social stratification of (r) in New York City department stores, and has been applied to various speech communities thereafter. One of the most recent studies, extending DSS by adding another interviewer with a different identity, is discussed in particular. It is proposed that DSS allows us to study linguistic variation in two equally effective ways. At the micro-level, it offers insights into the structuring of a speech community with reference to linguistic variables; also, it informs our understanding of macro-level language use in public settings in a multilingual society. Finally, the strengths and limitations of DSS are evaluated in terms of data collection in urban speech communities.

Pragmatics is the study of language use. It encompasses how speakers say what to whom in a given speech community. The teaching of pragmatics involves helping language learners learn what to say in situations (sociopragmatics) and how to say it (pragmalinguistics) as well as what not to say. Different languages, cultures, and speech communities often have different pragmatics, which creates the need to learn pragmatics along with other aspects of language. Research into the effect of instruction on pragmatics shows that instruction is effective across a range of learner and contextual variables including proficiency, instructional context, types of instruction, pragmatic targets, and ways in which development is measured. Although pragmatics researchers have demonstrated that the effects of instruction on pragmatics are very robust, the teaching of pragmatics in language classrooms lags behind more traditional areas of teaching, such as grammar and pronunciation. This entry discusses what pragmatics is, what makes it an important target of instruction and how it is different from traditional areas of teaching, the relation of pragmatics to existing approaches to teaching, and pedagogical proposals for teaching pragmatics. It then reviews the major findings of instructional effect studies and what challenges have to be met in order to see curriculum‐level integration of pragmatics and what possible solutions might be. The entry ends by considering possible future directions for the teaching of pragmatics.

The paper presents two objections against Putnam’s Twin Earth argument, which was intended to secure semantic externalism. I first claim that Putnam’s reasoning rests on two assumptions and then try to show why these assumptions are contentious. The first objection is that, given what we know about science, it is unlikely that there are any natural-kind terms whose extension is codetermined by a small set of microstructures required by Putnam’s indexical account of extension determination. The second objection is that there may not be a plausible concept of a speech community whose adoption would classify Oscar and Twin Oscar as members of different speech communities and, at the same time, render Oscar and Twin Oscar as being in the same psychological state. I contend that Putnam’s argument fails because both objections are justified.

The present thesis is the first thorough grammatical description of Romeyka, i.e., the Muslim variety of Pontic Greek still spoken in the indigenous setting in Trabzon province in north-eastern Turkey. While the language of the Christian speech communities of Pontus has been featured in earlier research during the last hundred years – both in Pontus prior to the population exchange in 1923, and after that in Greece –, less research is available on the variety of Pontic Greek as spoken by Muslims in the area at present. As an unrecognized minority language in a Turkish-dominant majority society and due to ambivalent attitudes and identificational links of the speakers towards their language, Romeyka is currently undergoing language shift to Turkish. While the language has been in contact with Turkish for several hundred years – which arguably resulted in a number of lexical and structural contact influences albeit without leading to a mixed acrolect –, the influence of Turkish on domains where traditionally Romeyka used to be spoken has grown following labour migration from the Black Sea area to larger cities in western Turkey since the 1960s posing now – dependent upon the speech community – a threat to the vitality of Romeyka. On the other hand, Pontic Greek – and in particular the Muslim variety – is known to be a conservative representative of Asia Minor Greek preserving archaisms dating back via Hellenistic and Medieval Greek to Ancient Greek, among them so notorious grammatical features as the Romeyka infinitive, but also complex negators and pronominal forms. It is the aim of the present thesis to describe the synchronic grammar of Romeyka as currently spoken especially by elderly speakers in the Of valley, whose variety can be considered the most archaic. As a basis for profound grammatical research – and as a contribution towards language description and documentation at the same time –, a spoken language corpus has been compiled from the variety Romeyka of Of as spoken in Çaykara based on recordings of naturalistic oral texts produced by ten speakers mainly during fieldwork in the area in 2019. In order to contribute to further scholarly research, the corpus has been transcribed, translated and fully grammatically annotated and will be made publicly available upon the publication of the thesis. In the light of the ongoing language shift in Romeyka, the present thesis focuses on the actual use of the language by bilingual – and most often Turkish dominant – speakers. In order to disentangle the factors that led to the present grammatical shape of Romeyka, three research questions targeting potential causes for the grammatical developments have been considered: (I.) How strong is the Turkish influence on the grammar of Romeyka? (II.) Does the setting of Romeyka as a minority language in a Turkish-dominant society, namely the process of language shift, play a role in grammatical change? (III.) How persistent are the inherited Greek features and what is the role of language-internal changes? However, since the primary aim of the present thesis is the description and presentation of linguistic structures forming potential candidates for an ongoing language change compared to earlier varieties of Greek and to closely related varieties of Asia Minor Greek, the theoretical questions can only tentatively be answered at the present stage of research. It can be nevertheless stated that Romeyka seems to have preserved its Greek core with a Greek basic lexicon, albeit with considerable lexical influences from Turkish in both content and functional word classes, but probably to a lesser extent compared to its close relative Cappadocian. Furthermore, Romeyka appears to preserve indeed a number of archaic features as well as certain particularities of Pontic such as a complex system of spatial deixis. On the other hand, there are considerable Turkish influences on the structural domain such as for example in progressives, verb serialization, adjunct and relative clauses and clause combination, that have evolved under long-time contact and appear consistently across different speakers. In addition, certain contact-induced structural features especially at the syntactic domain have been found to be sensitive to the bilingual profile of the individual speaker, i.e., among others, the dominant language, namely the borrowing of the Turkish question particle mI, OV word orders in declarative clauses, and an increase in non-finite complementation strategies. This finding led to the assumption that – apart from long-term contact-induced changes which seem not to impair the grammatical integrity of Romeyka – language shift is a matter of individual multilingual speaker profiles with different degrees of Turkish dominance in both language competence and use. Finally, it is argued that the specific communicative setting in which Romeyka is spoken, and which determines the communicative practice of the speakers, is decisive to set the pragmatic frame for the language(s) used: in Turkish-dominant settings, speakers tend to be more inclined to apply multiple forms of code-switching and show stronger influences of Turkish structures.

Integration of ethnic minorities into society is often operationalized as participation in various societal institutions. Examples are cultural, political and labour participation. On the basis of the theoretical concepts of social and cultural capital as proposed by sociologists Bourdieu and Coleman, it is often hypothesized that greater parental participation in society will generally lead to a better educational position for the children of such parents. To test this hypothesis, descriptive and multi-level analyses were conducted using data from the Dutch cohort study Primary Education. The sample included information on nearly 11,000 kindergarten students (6-year-olds) from almost 600 primary schools. In the analyses, ethnic minority parents and their children were compared to native Dutch parents and their children. After controlling for parental socio-economic and ethnic background, the results showed an effect of cultural participation only on language and mathematics skills. No effects on non-cognitive outcomes, such as social position, individual well-being or self-confidence, were found.

The present study aims at exploring the morphological variations in British English throughout formal and informal contexts, with an emphasis on how linguistic forms adapt to varying ranges of formality. Morphology, as a main part of language structure, performs a vital role in expressing social magnificence and communication style. The study looks at the ways in which social class, audience, and context affect morphological choices, focusing especially on the distinction between formal and informal registers. Data were collected from a variety of sources, including British newspapers, casual conversations, social media posts, and formal broadcasts. The results show notable variations in morphological patterns: formal situations and contexts stick to the use of full forms, politeness markers, and adherence to standard grammatical rules, whereas informal contexts demonstrate much more use of contractions, colloquial expressions, and regional dialectal influences. The study also examines the social and contextual factors that participate in shaping these variations, providing better understanding into how speakers adapt their language to conform to perceived levels of formality. The findings help to a great extent in understanding how English morphology is flexible across various registers and highlight the significance of social context in influencing language use. This research provides a deeper knowledge of how morphological variety might improve communication in different social and professional contexts such as, sociolinguistics, language teaching, and natural language processing.

Sociolinguistics pays attention to the social aspects of human language. Sociolinguistics discusses the relationship between language and society. In the following part of this paper, it will be focussed on the use of (1) language (2) dialects, (3) language variation, (4) social stratification, (5) register. This discussion talks about the five types of those topics because they are really problematic sort of things, which relate the social life of the local people. In relation to this, the most important point is to distinguish the terms from one to another. There are three main points to discuss: language, dialects and register. Languages which are used as medium of communication have many varieties. These language variations are created by the existence of social stratification in the community. Social stratification will determine the form of language use by the speakers who involve in the interaction. The language variation can be in the form of dialects and register. Dialect of a language correlates with such social factors such as socio-economic status, age, occupation of the speakers. Dialect is a variety of a particular language which is used by a particular group of speakers that is signaled by systematic markers such as syntactical, phonological, grammatical markers. Dialects which are normally found in the speech community may be in the forms of regional dialect and social dialect. Register is the variation of language according to the use. It means that where the language is used as a means of communication for certain purposes. It depends entirely on the domain of language used. It is also a function of all the other components of speech situation. A formal setting may condition a formal register, characterized by particular lexical items. The informal setting may be reflected in casual register that indicates less formal vocabulary, more non-standard features, greater instances of stigmatized variables, and so on.Keywords: language, dialect, register and sociolinguistic.

Any activities conducted at the boundary area between countries will only be successful if the community of speakers has mutual understanding in terms of language, especially those involving business. This study focuses on a community in the northern part of Malaysia near the Thailand border where majority of people are bilingual in Malay and Thai. This study aims to investigate the patterns of language used by speakers in the Malaysia-Thailand border, in the context of language maintenance and language shift. Both countries use different languages; with Malaysians use Malay and the Thais use Thai language. In this cross-border context, activities pertaining to business, visit or personal matters will have an impact on the development of the two languages. This study presents the findings on the language choice from a survey involving 202 respondents that was conducted in two border towns at the Malaysia-Thailand border, namely Rantau Panjang (Malaysian side) and Golok (Thailand side). By utilizing the domain concept that was introduced by Fishman (1972), this study focuses on two domains namely, business and family. In addition to the questionnaire, participant observations and interviews were also conducted as supplements. The data on the patterns of language choice were analyzed statistically. The findings show that although Malaysians and Thais speak two different languages, Kelantanese dialect, which is a variety of the standard Malay, was the most dominant language at the border. This study also found that age was a significant factor in determining the patterns of language use. The younger generations were using Kelantanese dialect and Thai language in domains where older people would only use Kelantanese dialect. This points to the occurrence of language shift at the border. However, the community at the Thai side of the border tends to choose Kelantanese dialect in their daily activities, which seems to indicate language maintenance in this area. These findings suggest that language can serve as a marker of identity, especially for those communities in Golok as most of them are originally from Malaysia. Finally, this study has contributed empirical data on language usage at the Malaysia-Thailand border.

Sociolinguistics is a multilingual collection of research methodologies with distinct objects, dissimilar agendas, and differing points of origin. Broadly, sociolinguists investigate the relationship between social context and language structure or use on the assumption that aspects of structure and use require reference to social context for their description and explanation. In practice, the “socio-“of sociolinguistics can refer to three things, separately or in combination: an act or action of language use that requires, minimally, two people for its performance or one person acting as two; language use that is connected to the identity or identities, be they achieved or attributed, of a speaker or speakers; and/or language use that is involved in the expression of ideology. Using these three types of social facts, we may ask how researchers find the social in a sociolinguistic analysis of structure and use. We suggest here that sociolinguists use three fundamental approaches. Each involves a positioning of the social with respect to the linguistic or the linguistic with respect to the social. These approaches are: Constraint Approach: One may find the social as extra-linguistic constraints or conditions on use of competing forms. Indexicality Approach: One may find the social as indexed by structures/forms, codes (styles, dialects, languages), or acts. Discursive Construction Approach: One may find the social in the explicit and inferrable details of collaborative, sequential, discursive construction. Because the Indexical and Discursive Construction approaches overlap, we will present selected readings in two broad categories. In the first, we will focus on research in Variationist Sociolinguistics which most aptly illustrates the Constraint Approach. However, in Variationist work, the Indexical Approach also appears within research into the Social Meanings of variation. In turn, we will review key publications in socially informed discourse analysis which further illustrate both the Indexical and Discursive Construction Approaches.