WP15 Speech community

Speech community’ has been a troubled term, caught in a number of methodological, epistemic and political cross-currents, and in this paper I will try to trace some of its most important shifts in meaning since the 1960s. My discussion is divided into the following sections: (1) Community speech and speech community: Pragmatic vs distributional perspectives; (2) Speech community at the interface of ‘tradition and modernity’; (3) Late modern discourse, language and community; (4) Communities of practice; (5) Community as a semiotic sign; (6) Language ideologies and the production of community; (7) From the ‘linguistics of community’ to a ‘linguistics of contact’; (8) Community and discourse in the Information Age; (9) Conclusion.