Speech Community Research Paper

Because it is so difficult to define what a speech community is precisely, I’m not sure exactly how many specific speech communities I belong to. There may be speech communities within my speech communities that I’m not even aware of, or speech communities that overlap. In this essay, I will discuss one particular speech community and one of its sub-communities.

The general definition of a speech community is pretty hard to define, but I think Gumperz does a good job in covering the overall sense of it. He says the speech community is, “any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage." I found this

It must be based on finite sets of grammatical rules that underlie the production of well-formed sentences, or else messages will not be intelligible.” Yet the fangirl speech community does the exact opposite of this; it is an interesting case because it rejects standard English grammatical rules in an “anything goes” sort of fashion. For example, if a member of the fangirl community were to say, “I just finished watching episode one of this show and I’m dead; I literally cannot even,” other members of the fangirl community would right away understand that this person is overwhelmed with amusement, while people unfamiliar with fangirl terminology would be confused as to why the girl said she was dead and whether or not the phrase “I literally cannot even” was intentionally left unfinished or whether it is a grammatical mistake. It is then difficult for people outside of the fangirl community to understand why words are purposefully misspelled and sentences are intentionally left unfinished. My own parents have asked me before what the phrase “I can’t even” means. An unofficial definition on the Urban Dictionary says that it is, “The complete, sudden onset of the cessation of brain activity, brought under the presence of acute stress, which fully affects the person only a short time after it strikes them. Said person, under the duress of the symptoms, demonstrate their

One sub-community in particular has gained recent popularity, the Hallyu wave speech community. The Hallyu wave (also known as the Korean wave) is a name to describe the recent “wave” of interest in South Korean culture in countries all over the world. This speech community is very unique its structure. One question that has been raised in class is, “Can people from different countries who speak different languages share the same speech community?” With the Hallyu Wave, the answer is a definite “yes”. In Gumperz’ definition of a speech community, he says, “Most groups of any permanence, be they small bands bounded by face-to-face contact, modern nations divisible into smaller subregions, or even occupational associations or neighborhood gangs, may be treated as speech communities.” But since this statement was made in the 1960s, it fails to recognize the internet as a mode of communication. The Hallyu wave is a speech community that lives on the internet since many of its fans live in countries outside of South Korea. Since Korean culture is not as widely acknowledged in the United States, many Korean pop fans face the problem of not knowing anyone with the same interests as them in their daily lives. For this reason, they bond with other people on the internet, many of whom come from countries outside of the U.S. But what is most interesting about the Hallyu Wave community is that