This document discusses concepts related to speech communities in sociolinguistics. It defines a speech community as a social group whose speech characteristics are of interest and can be described coherently. An individual may belong to multiple intersecting communities and code switch between languages. Their social networks and the density of connections also influence language use. Finally, it notes that each individual has their own speech repertoire, or range of linguistic varieties they can appropriately use as a member of their communities.

1. GROUP 2
1. Maya Sudarwati (1271272)
2. Rezza Risqi V (1271284)
3. Nailul Chumaidah (1271229)
SPEECH COMMUNITIES
Sociolinguistics is the study of the language use on or among groups of speaker. While
group is people association that have at least two members and they have more than one reason
to make the group as like social, religious, political, cultural, familial, vocational, a
vocational, etc. The kind of group that sociolinguists have generally attempted to study is
called the speech community. (See Patrick, 2002, for a general survey.). Lyons (1970,
p. 326) offers a definition of what he calls a ‘real’ speech community: ‘all the people
who use a given language (or dialect).’ However , that really shifts the issue to making
the definition of a language (or of a dialect) also the definition of a speech community.in
this sense, “Speech Community” is very abstract concept ,we decide that a speech community is no
more than some kind of social group whose speech characteristics are of interest and
can be described in a coherent manner.
While an intersecting community is a person’s perceptions of the language
characteristics of particular areas do not always accord with linguistic facts. Rosen (1980,
pp. 56 –7) has also indicated some of the problems you find in trying to call a city
like London a speech community and in describing exactly what characterizes its speech
. For example a person may live in a bilingual setting and switch easily back and forth
between two languages. One of the consequences of the intersecting identifications is, of
course, linguistic variation: people do not speak alike, nor does any individual always
speak in the same way on every occasion
Another way of viewing how an individual relates to other individuals in society
is from their network with participate in. That is how and on what occasions does a
specific individual interact ? How intensive are the various relationships? How extensive
is relationship in the sense of how many other individuals interact with both them ?
There are two kind of network dense network and multiplex network. Dense Network is if
the people you know and interact with also know and interact with one another while
multiplexnetworkif the people within it are tied together in more than one way,if the one do not
the network is a loose one.
An individual also has a speech repertoire; that is, he or she controls a
number of varieties of a language or of two or more languages. Quite often, many
individuals will have virtually identical repertoires. In this case it may be possible to
argue, as Platt and Platt (1975, p. 35) do, that ‘A speech repertoire is the range of
linguistic varieties which the speaker has at his disposal and which he may
appropriately use as a member of his speech community. Focusing on the repertoires of
individuals and specifically on the precise linguistic choices they make in well-defined
circumstances does seem to offer us some hope of explaining how people use linguistic
choices to bond themselves to others in very subtle ways. The concept of ‘speech
repertoire’ may be most useful when applied to indi- viduals rather than to groups. We
can use it to describe the communicative competence of individual speakers. Each
person will then have a distinctive speech repertoire.