Summary of Speech Community

According to Romaine (1994:22) “A speech community is a group of people who do not necessarily share the same language, but share a set of norms and rules for the use of language. The boundaries between speech communities are essentially social rather than linguistic. A speech community is not necessarily co-extensive with a language community.
However, we have two types of speech community - the primary and secondary speech communities.

Primary speech community is composed of people who have always live in the same neighbourhood and who usually speak the same language. Rural communities fall under this category, e.g. Tonkere and Abagbooro in Ife.

Secondary speech community composed of people that come together from different regions for a number of reasons. It could be for social economic, political, religious, educational reasons. These groups of people adopt one language for social and linguistic interaction because they are heterogeneous in nature. 

INTERSECTING COMMUNITIES

Intersecting communities indicating the Speaker of places do use expressions indicates that they some idea of how a “typical” person from each place speaks – to be a member of a particular speech community somewhat loosely defined. E.g.: New York speech, London Speech, South African Speech.

Dialects and languages are beginning to influence each other, for example London is a community in some sences but not in others. Neither a single speech community even though it has 300 languages or more, its too big and fragmented. It is to difficult to relate of speech community directly to language or languages spoken.

Each member of a community has a repertoire of social identities that are each one in a given context is associated with a number of nonverbal and verbal forms of expression. There is not a clear way on how to define how individuals can classify themselves and speaker are creating and recreating social identities. So, it is impossible to predict the group or community he or she will consider itself to belong in a particular moment. This group will change according to situation.