Speech community

These assumptions have been challenged by later scholarship that has demonstrated that individuals generally participate in various speech communities simultaneously and at different times in their lives.

Gumperz also sought to set up a typological framework for describing how linguistic systems can be in use within a single speech community.

Gumperz's formulation was, however, effectively overshadowed by Noam Chomsky's[4] redefinition of the scope of linguistics as being : concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.Another influential conceptualization of the linguistic community was that of William Labov,[5] which can be seen as a hybrid of the Chomskyan structural homogeneity and Gumperz's focus on shared norms informing variable practices.

However, like Chomsky, Labov also saw each of the formally distinguished linguistic varieties within a speech community as homogeneous, invariant and uniform.

Probably because of their considerable explanatory power, Labov's and Chomsky's understandings of the speech community became widely influential in linguistics.

Some scholars recommended abandoning the concept altogether and instead conceptualizing it as "the product of the communicative activities engaged in by a given group of people.

"[9] Others acknowledged the community's ad hoc status as "some kind of social group whose speech characteristics are of interest and can be described in a coherent manner".

[10] Practice theory, as developed by social thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and Michel de Certeau, and the notion of the community of practice as developed by Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger has been applied to the study of the language community by linguists William Hanks[11][12][13][14] and Penelope Eckert.

[15][16][17][18] Eckert aimed at an approach to sociolinguistic variation that did not include any social variable (e.g. class, gender, locality).

The notion of speech community is most generally used as a tool to define a unit of analysis within which to analyse language variation and change.