Читать книгу An Introduction to Sociolinguistics - Ronald Wardhaugh, Janet M. Fuller - Страница 70

As indicated above, one possible definition of a speech community is simply a group of people who interact regularly. Such groups and communities themselves are ever changing, their boundaries are often porous, and internal relationships shift. They must constantly reinvent and recreate themselves. Today’s middle class, youth, New Yorkers, women, immigrants, and so on, are not yesterday’s nor will they be tomorrow’s. The group chosen to identify with will also change according to situation: at one moment religion may be important; at another, regional origin; and at still another, perhaps membership in a particular profession or social class. An individual may also attempt to bond with others because all possess a set of characteristics, or even just a single characteristic (e.g., be of the same gender), or even because all lack a certain characteristic (e.g., are not categorized as ‘White’). Language bonding appears to be no different. In one case, command of a particular language may be a potent marker and, therefore, help create a sense of community and solidarity with others (e.g., a group of Italian speakers abroad); in another case, where you speak a variety associated with Sardinia or Sicily may divide these same speakers. However, even sharing the same dialect might be of no significance: if the circumstances require you to discuss astrophysics, your knowledge of the terms and concepts of astrophysics may be more important than the regional or social dialect you speak. Alternatively, speakers of Yoruba may find themselves forming a community with speakers of Japanese and Arabic within an English‐speaking foreign‐student speech community at a North American or European university.

One way sociolinguists try to get at this dynamic view of social groups is with the idea that speakers participate in various communities of practice. Eckert and McConnell‐Ginet (1998, 490) define a community of practice as ‘an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagements in some common endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of their joint activity around that endeavor.’ A community of practice is at the same time its members and what its members are doing to make them a community: a group of workers in a factory, an extended family, an adolescent friendship group, a women’s fitness class, a Kindergarten classroom, and so on. They add (1998, 490): ‘Rather than seeing the individual as some disconnected entity floating around in social space, or as a location in a network, or as a member of a particular group or set of groups, or as a bundle of social characteristics, we need to focus on communities of practice.’ (See Meyerhoff and Strycharz 2013 for additional details.) It is such communities of practice that shape individuals, provide them with their identities, and often circumscribe what they can do. Eckert (1988, 2000) used this concept in her research in a Detroit‐area high school and Mendoza‐Denton (2008) also used it in her work with groups of Latina girls in California. These variationist sociolinguistic studies will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5.

One study which makes use of the community of practice construct for the study of language and identities is Bucholtz (1999), an investigation of the language of ‘nerd girls’ in a US high school. Bucholtz notes the following ways in which the concept of speech community is inadequate for research on language gender:

1 Its tendency to take language as central.

2 Its emphasis on consensus as the organizing principle of community.

3 Its preference for studying central members of the community over those at the margins.

4 Its focus on the group at the expense of individuals.

5 Its view of identity as a set of static categories.

6 Its valorization of researchers’ interpretations over participants’ own understandings of their practices. (1999, 207)

Bucholtz argues that within the community of practice framework, we can define a social group by all social practices, not just language. This concept can also incorporate the idea that there may be conflict within a group about these practices and norms, and thus marginal members of communities, as individuals, can be better included in the analysis. Further, as we will discuss below, this does not put speakers into pre‐existing identity categories, but focuses instead on their own construction of identity. Finally, through ethnographic research, it allows for the analysis to focus on how the speakers themselves, not the researcher, enact group memberships.

In this study on nerd girls, Bucholtz notes how the girls both conform to the larger social order (i.e., by focusing on academic achievement) and also resist it (i.e., by rejecting traditional ideas of femininity in dress and appearance). The values of the members of this community of practice are not set norms which define them, but rather are negotiated through ongoing social practices, that is, their interactions serve to define what a nerd is and how the various members of their group fit in this category.

This concept of authenticity in an identity category can also be found in Jones (2011), who writes about the construction of an ‘(in)authentic lesbian’ identity within a lesbian women’s community of practice, in which ‘girly’ practices were deemed less authentic than ‘dykey’ ones.

There are also studies which seek to expand on the community of practice concept of conflict, not consensus, as part of interaction. Davies (2005, 1) argues that the idea of legitimacy is central in community of practice analyses and power structures cannot be ignored: ‘While practices may define the community, the community determines who has access to that practice.’ Moore (2006) looks at narratives told among high school students in the northwest of England, noting that status inequalities can lead to inequitable allocation of control within a community of practice, and that such hierarchies must be taken into account in the study of community‐building and identity construction. (See Gee 2005 for a further discussion of this issue and the usefulness of the community of practice approach for linguistic studies.)

The community of practice framework has also been used to study online communities (Angouri 2016). Early research explicitly focused on the development of norms; Herring (2001, 622), in an article reviewing research on computer‐mediated communication, writes: ‘Over time, computer‐mediated groups develop norms of practice regarding “how things are done” and what constitutes socially desirable behavior; these may then be codified in “Frequently Asked Question” documents (FAQs …) and netiquette guidelines.’ Other aspects of research which make reference to norm development are within the area of pragmatics, looking at how (im)politeness expectations are negotiated in online contexts (e.g., Graham 2007; Locher 2010; Kavanagh 2016). (See chapter 4 for further discussion of pragmatics and politeness theory.)

Another theme in research employing the community of practice framework and online contexts is the focus on the emergence of communities and the negotiation of individual identities with regard to community membership (Georgakopoulou 2006). For example, Cochrane (2017) examines how community‐building takes place through blogs of wheelchair users. There is increasing focus on online communities for language learning purposes, including networks of language teachers; see England (2018) for an overview of this for TESOL. (See also Eckert and McConnell‐Ginet 2007 for a further discussion of this aspect of communities of practice, i.e., the positioning of their members with relation to the world beyond the community of practice.)