Speech communities is a volume in the Cambridge series ‘Key topics in linguistic anthropology’. Its format, with discussion questions and further reading at the end of each chapter, suggests that it is intended as a textbook, but the description of the series says that the books are ‘designed to bridge the gap between textbooks and primary literature’, though it continues on to say that they can ‘be used on courses and seminars’ (p. iii).
Given the design of the series, it is not surprising that the opening chapter is titled ‘What are speech communities?’. Morgan argues that for a group of people to be a community they must share something and in the case of speech communities it is ‘values and attitudes about language use, varieties and practices’ (p. 1) that are shared. The concept of speech community is not about language as structure, it is about language as culture. It is not just about people speaking the same language, it is about knowing how to be meaningful in social contexts. Morgan does a good job in this chapter of reviewing concepts of speech community, from Leonard Bloomfield in 1933, through Noam Chomsky, John J. Gumperz, Dell Hymes, William Labov, to Alessandro Duranti and herself most recently. I found it disappointing, however, that she does not explore relationships between the concept of speech community and other concepts, particularly ‘community of practice’, which is currently in wide use. In that regard, while Lave & Wenger's (Reference Lave and Wenger1991) Situated learning is included in Morgan's twenty-eight-page bibliography at the end of the book, perhaps tellingly, Wenger's (Reference Wenger1998) Communities of practice does not appear.
Chapter 2 focuses on how members and others represent speech communities, and on how speech communities develop. These two aspects are closely interrelated. A speech community can develop due to external force, or because a group of people just end up together, or because a group intentionally forms one. Identities and ideologies are central in speech communities, and so how members represent themselves and how others represent them are important to members of such groups.
Chapter 3 explores the shared conventions of speech communities and the importance of socialization. Morgan argues that competent members not only recognize speech events, verbal genres, and so on, but they also know what to say and when to say it and they understand ‘the potential meanings of interactions’ (p. 48). She gives examples from the literature of greeting practices in Wolof, among the Tuareg of the Western Sahara, and in the African American culture, to illustrate what people should know about greetings and how what they know relates to language ideology in their cultures.
Chapter 4 is titled ‘The African American speech community’, yet Morgan defines the community in terms of ancestry: ‘The African American speech community refers to the community of speakers whose African ancestors experienced plantation slavery in the US’ (p. 50). Morgan claims that African Americans orient to African American English whether through its use or its nonuse. She explains how a system of indirectness is central to African American discourse and is learned through socialization from adults and older children, and how uses of two types of direct discourse styles are seen as choices by members of the community. The first type is called ‘direct discourse’ and ‘occurs in institutional settings where the event or context prescribes speaker intent’ (p. 62). The second type is called ‘directed discourse’ and ‘is marked by the absence of indirection, audience collaboration and a disregard for social context’ (p. 62).
In chapter 5, as I understand it, Morgan makes a case that there is a global hip-hop speech community on the grounds that members share a language ideology within the community though not necessarily a language (or languages). I did not find the speech community case fully convincing, though Morgan's evidence made it clear that there is indeed a global hiphop culture (and thus community). The material Morgan presented made more sense to me within a framework of a global culture (rather than speech community) with connections with a range of more localized speech communities. At this point I would like to have seen more discussion of how the concepts of culture, community, language, and speech community relate to each other.
Chapter 6 focuses on gender and sexuality, and the examples Morgan draws on come primarily from African American experience. Here again, she emphasizes a shared ideology of language use as central to the concept of speech community, in this case of women's speech communities. For example, she draws on her own research into African American women's discursive practices to show how laughter is used as indirect reference to index and thus highlight how a speaker is critical of injustice or power. Somewhat confusingly though, she claims in her conclusion to the chapter that ‘both men and women who are socialized within the African American experience share their ideology of language use’ (p. 96). It is not clear to me how a women's speech community based on a shared ideology of language use is distinguishable from a speech community of men and women who share an ideology of language use.
Chapter 7 goes online and explores how the internet affects and builds communities. This may be a particularly telling context in a consideration of the future development of speech communities, because there may be no face-to-face interactions involved at all, though members of online communities bring with them their experiences of communities that do involve face-to-face interaction. Interestingly, in the discussion questions at the end of this chapter Morgan uses only the terms online community/communities and not the terms online speech community/communities. While this may seem appropriate, given that online communication does not involve speaking, it seems to undermine the case Morgan has made in this chapter that online communities are nevertheless speech communities.
Chapter 8 explores how speech communities and their beliefs and values relate to educational policy. It also discusses dominant and marginalized speech communities with respect to language standards, and it considers the inflexibility of language standards by comparison with the shifting nature of varieties and ways of using language in communities.
Chapter 9 discusses performativity and play, with a focus on humor. What a speaker intends as humorous may not be interpreted that way by an audience, and vice versa, and the relationship between speaker, intended humor, and audience interpretation may indicate where speech community boundaries lie. Differences in the intentions and interpretations may be offensive to either speaker or audience.
Morgan closes her book with a chapter titled ‘Power, ideology, and prejudice’. She considers the potential for conflict between speech communities and concludes that ‘Clearly we are not people who will always share the same norms about language use across life spans and social, political and technological contexts’ (p. 156). She argues that we linguists need to continue our work so that we understand more and that ‘we always find a way to keep talking to each other’ (p. 156).
One of the strengths of Morgan's book is that in every chapter she introduces and explores examples from the literature to illustrate and explicate the ideas and issues that she discusses. Many of these examples come from African American contexts, but a diverse range of other contexts is included, for example, Venezuela, the Warm Springs Indian reservation, hiphop, Mozambique, Kenya, Norway, and the internet.
This is quite a short book, but in it Morgan has given us a wide-ranging and at times provocative discussion of speech communities. She brings together a lot of concepts, issues, and examples, and shows convincingly that this is an important and complex area that warrants continuing study. What her discussion makes clear is that people are usually members of multiple speech communities, and that change is ongoing both within speech communities and in the formation of new speech communities. What is still not so clear is an answer to the question that headed chapter 1—What are speech communities?—though Morgan shows that shared language and discourse conventions, shared culture and shared ideology are central components of such an answer.
