noun

• A group of people sharing a common language or dialect.

  ‘Copying can be exact: members of a speech community can share identical phonological representations.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘We can all be categorised into a speech community by way of language, professional idiolect, local or acquired dialect, accent or habitual usage.’
  • ‘Research on language acquisition tells us that all normal children acquire the language of their speech community effortlessly and flawlessly.’
  • ‘A speech community is not necessarily coextensive with a language community.’
  • ‘Today, nearly all English speakers drop g's sometimes, but in a given speech community, the proportion varies systematically depending on formality, social class, sex, and other variables as well.’
  • ‘It's not a folk etymology, because this is the usage of one person rather than an entire speech community.’
  • ‘As with other speech acts, apologies can serve as illuminating sources of information on the sociocultural values of a speech community, including possible differences between female and male values.’
  • ‘If a reanalysis takes hold, it must usually be because it spontaneously happens over and over, not because one infant's idea spreads to the speech community as a whole.’
  • ‘These are of course not representative of the speech community as a whole.’
  • ‘In this approach, the linguistic behavior of a speech community is based on frequency-counts of standard and non-standard variables across stylistic and social stratification.’
  • ‘On this base, rap discourse explores various resources provided by the linguistic repertoire of the speech community.’
  • ‘He also importantly adds that to participate in a speech community is not quite the same as being a member of it.’
  • ‘Chapter five offers explanations that aim at resolving the unusual finding of gender, class and education patterns in the Cairene speech community.’
  • ‘Egypt is part of the Arabic speech community of about 250 million people, spread from Morocco to Oman.’
  • ‘The concept of a discourse community borrows from that of a speech community.’
  • ‘These variants point to a performer working out names according to phonemic norms in his or her speech community.’
  • ‘Every once in a while, such mistakes do get picked up by enough members of some speech community to reach the status of a genuine variant.’
  • ‘Whatever the outcome, linguists' best protection against such problems is to be solidly based in the speech communities in question, which is a good idea in any event.’
  • ‘In fact, any honest observer who has worked on even the most extensively documented speech communities will recognize the sort of thing that they are writing about.’
  • ‘These are not numbers of speakers of the minority languages, however, as the Catalan, Gallego, and Basque provinces all hold diverse populations and speech communities.’