@schwar and I investigated how the long-attested concepts of speech communities and communities of practice also exist on the internet – we used some job hunting subreddits as a case study.

what is a speech community?

In 1965, Noam Chomsky put forward his idea of what a linguist should study in his new book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.  Chomsky states that “Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.”  Now, while Chomsky is called the father of linguistics today, a few other linguists disagreed with his stance that linguists should only be interested in the ideal language in the ideal situation with the ideal speaker-listener.  One of these linguists was Gumperz, who, in 1968, three years after Noam Chomsky first published his book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, introduced what he would call the Speech Community.

Chomsky was only interested in how language worked, what rules were dedicated to how it was used, and how children learned it. Other surrounding details and context were not necessary;  Gumperz disagreed.  Gumperz was building his own language theory based on earlier work by dialectologists.  Alongside other linguists of his time, like Dell Hymes and William Labov, Gumperz prefers to study language within a social context.  He put forth the framework of the Speech Community, as previously mentioned. A core tenet of a Speech Community is that it is a group of people in an area or domain that speak in the same or similar manner.  These weren’t isolated communities, however, as these Speech Communities could be further subdivided into smaller groups or lumped into larger groups with other communities; the point is that speech communities frequently interact with one another and that innovations made in one community may spread to another nearby. Speech Communities can develop anywhere humans interact, including on THE WORLD-WIDE WEB!!!  If you want to see perfect examples of this, the next time you’re on Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter, look at how people speak (aka. type), and you might see some differences between each site and similarities within the sites. Now, these differences arise partly through the allowances afforded by each site, with different comment and interactive structures, but also mainly through users frequenting some sites more often than others and developing similar linguistic patterns to their fellow users.

In his paper defining the concept, Gumperz focused on geographic proximity, but later, linguists would also apply a variety of social factors, such as one’s gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, economic status, and almost any other social division humans define themselves by. However, these social factors would develop into their own concept, introduced by the Weird Word Nerd:

– schwar

what is a community of practice?

To sum up, what Schwar has said, a speech community is a group of people in a place that use language in the same way. But that’s still INCREDIBLY broad, and generalizations aren’t really a thing when you look at real life. In any one place, there are still subgroups of people with specific interests, knowledge, and goals who interact with other people who have the same knowledge, interests, and goals. We need to look at a more specific concept here: what sociologists and anthropologists call a community of practice. 

Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet introduced this concept to sociolinguistics in 1992 by proposing that there is still variation even when looking within a speech community. Eckert conducted an ethnographic exploration of a speech community – a high school. Gumperz would claim that because this high school consisted of a group of people in a place, they must all speak in the same way. BUT! In her groundbreaking book Jocks and Burnouts, she identified groups within the speech community that had distinct interests, goals, and knowledge. These groups were the Jocks and the Burnouts, who had different identities even though they were in the same place. Each group had a distinct goal: not to be associated with the other group. Individuals showed which group they were a part of through what they wore, where they hung out, what they did outside of school, and (most interestingly) how they talked. This research was well before its time – Eckert didn’t claim these groups were communities of practice in the book itself. But, it led to the discovery that communities of practice can explain some aspects of language variation. 

The Jocks and Burnouts used language to construct their identity.  For example, the Burnouts used double negation (sentences with two negatives – like “I don’t want nothing” instead of “I don’t want anything), which is not considered “grammatical.” The Burnouts used forms like these because Jocks used “standard” grammar that was taught in school, and they didn’t want to sound like Jocks. In this instance, language variation is not only correlated with identity; it is caused by it. The group used language to achieve a common goal – to differentiate themselves from the Jocks. This happens EVERYWHERE, especially given that people change how they speak depending on who they talk to. This is not just in face-to-face conversations; online forums attract people with specific interests who interact to achieve a common goal. Communities of practice also exist online.

-theweirdwordnerd

subreddits as CoPs: a case study

Reddit is a forum platform (think: speech community) that is further divided into subreddits by theme, topic, or goal (think: communities of practice). While people may be a part of several subreddits, each subreddit has a specific purpose, attracts a specific group of people, and use particular types of language. 

For example, an (unfortunately large) number of people are trying to find a job and are trying to find people to relate to. A person has a few different options for subreddits to interact with depending on what exactly they are looking for: 

• r/jobs – users rant and share stories of struggling to find a job
• r/resumes – users post their resumes with the expectation of critique
• r/linkedinlunatics – users share ridiculously bad advice posted on Linkedin or satirize “successful” people being out of touch with the current market. 

These subreddits (communities of practice)  each have a clear and distinct goal, yet they have roughly the same intended audience. Each one has formulated specific uses of language:

r/jobs: respectful rants

a typical post on r/jobs: a rant on the struggles of the job market

a comment on that r/jobs post

Users who frequent r/jobs have the common goal of sharing their frustrations with their work/occupation or their struggles with finding a job. There are positive posts occasionally, but the main focus is venting. This can be seen in the featured post, which goes on a long rant about their current job search and how difficult, unfair, and exhausting the process is, especially with recruiters. The post uses emotionally charged language in a blunt, face-threatening way. Still, the author does attempt to mitigate to an extent by acknowledging their threat, but the overall post is a negative-face threat to recruiters.  The commenter, in response, used positive politeness throughout their post despite being a member of the group the original poster was attacking. The goal of the commenter was to assuage the worry of the poster and give the sense that they were all part of the same community, all working toward the same goal, as opposed to enemies.

r/resumes: aggressive advice?

a typical r/resumes post: a user looking for advice on their resume

a comment on that r/resumes post

The r/resumes community of practice has the common interest of trying to improve their resume to make it look more attractive to recruiters, and people with experience in a given field will give advice for what employers might be looking for. The comments that are giving advice do so in a terse, blunt way, ignoring any expectation of negative politeness strategies. For example, the featured comment starts with a negative face threat: “this is a BAD resume.” While this may come across as needlessly aggressive, the shared linguistic repertoire in this community of practice includes non-mitigated face threats as a linguistics norm to make advice clear and concise.

r/LinkedInLunatics: satirizing scams

a user shares a real, unironic post from LinkedIn on r/LinkedinLunatics

(with a sarcastic caption)

sarcastic comments satirizing the “LinkedIn Lunatic”

The shared goal of users in r/LinkedInLunatics is to spread awareness about ridiculous job-hunting scams. The strategy is usually criticism through satire, and the shared linguistic repertoire includes markers of sarcasm and irony to make fun of the outlandish claims these scammers make. The user who shared this post originally from LinkedIn drew attention to one of the phrases, “I would apply to 0 postings and still get hired!” but used irregular capitalization and emojis to indicate a mocking tone. The comments on the posts also satirize the content, such as “And there I was, thinking recruiters were contacting me because I was doing a good job like an IDIOT.” The capitalized “IDIOT” overemphasizes the tone, indicating that the comment should not be taken at face value. An outsider might be confused about why these comments appear to agree with the sentiment of the original post, but the users in the community of practice have negotiated that the comments are expected to be satirical.

final thoughts

while we only had the chance to look at one case study here, communities of practice are everywhere, online and off. keep an eye out for how you speak when you’re talking to people in different corners of the internet – you might be using a community-specific shared repertoire.

thanks @schwar! check them out on YouTube for writing system rants and other random language videos

also plz share any other examples of online CoPs you’ve come across! we definitely could do this again