Speech Community - Critique

Critique

Probably because of their considerable explanatory power, Labov's and Chomsky's understandings of the speech community became widely influential in linguistics. But gradually a number of problems with those models became apparent.

Firstly, it became increasingly clear that the assumption of homogeneity inherent in Chomsky and Labov´s models was untenable. The African American speech community which Labov had seen as defined by the shared norms of AAVE, was shown to be an illusion, as ideological disagreements about the status of AAVE among different groups of speakers attracted public attention.

Secondly, in the eagerness to describe all kinds of variation in communities with a shared linguistic standard, the concept of the speech community was extended to include very large scale communities such as entire nation states, or the entire international community of English speakers. By over-extending the concept in this way Gumperz' basic requirement that the community be united by routine interaction between its members could no longer be meaningfully evoked.

Thirdly, while Chomsky and Labov's models eschewed the possibility of significant variation taking place at the level of the individual, research in interactional sociolinguistics made it increasingly clear that intra-personal variation is common. It also became clear that choice of linguistic variant is often a situational choice made in relation to a specific speech context, than it is an expression of a permanent social identity, such as class, gender, or age.

Finally, the models of speech communities that assumed a set of shared norms that differed slightly among different social classes, were criticized for assuming that each individual have equal access to all linguistic forms, but just choose to produce the kind of speech associated with their particular social group. This assumption did not take account of power differentials within the community that sometimes work to restrict individual speakers' access to speech forms of other social groups, or which impose certain linguistic varieties on certain groups and individuals.

The force of these critiques led to a general unease with the concept of "speech communities" because of the many contradictory connotations of the term, and because of the general turn in anthropology towards looking at social organization in terms of hierarchy and power relations rather than studying social coherence and the construction of shared norms. Some scholars recommended abandoning the concept altogether as a preexisting object that can be studied instead conceptualizing it as "the product of the communicative activities engaged in by a given group of people." Others have proposed simply acknowledging 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".