Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a more or less discrete group of people who use language in a unique and mutually accepted way among themselves. Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. ...

Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct social groups like high school students or hip hop fans (see f.eg. ghetto lingo), or even tight-knit groups like families and friends. In addition, online and other mediated communities, such as Wikipedia, often constitute speech communities. Jargon is a type of terminology which is used in conjunction with a specific activity, e. ... Hip hop is a cultural movement that began amongst urban African American youth in New York and has since spread around the world. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-06-25, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ...

Speech communities, especially online, often develop terms that would be of little use to most people, but which is of value to the people involved. For instance, IRC develops such words as kick or op. Special terms that have emerged on Wikipedia include: Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of instant communication over the Internet. ...

• Fancruft: a controversial term for articles about extremely minor details of an entertainment franchise or fictional universe. Characteristic examples of "fancruft" include articles about a single joke on The Simpsons or a Star Trek fanscript. Since many Wikipedia contributors consider the term derogatory, it has been bowdlerized into forms such as "f*ncr*ft" and "foghat."
• Requests for Comment or RfC: a process for gaining community input on controversies regarding article content and user conduct.
• Stub: a short article that needs expansion.

Members of a speech community will often develop neologisms such as those above to serve the group's special purposes and priorities. For example, the Wikipedia term stub arose from a need to identify and publicize articles that need to be expanded so they contain the detail and rich content that would be expected in a high-quality encyclopedia. A fictional universe is a cohesive imaginary world that serves as the setting or backdrop for one or (more commonly) multiple works of fiction. ... The Simpsons is the longest-running American animated television series and overall sit-com, with 17 seasons and 366 episodes since it debuted on December 17, 1989 on FOX. The TV series, created by Matt Groening, is a spinoff of a series of animated shorts originally aired on The Tracey... Star Trek collectively refers to a science-fiction franchise spanning six unique television series, 726 episodes and ten motion pictures in addition to hundreds of novels, video games, and other works of fiction all set within the same fictional universe created by Gene Roddenberry in the mid-1960s. ... Thomas Bowdler (July 11, 1754 – February 24, 1825), an English physician, is best known as the source of the eponym bowdlerize (or bowdlerise), the process of censorship by arbitrary deletion of objectionable material from a work of literature to purify it. ... A neologism is word, term, or phrase which has been recently created (coined) —often to apply to new concepts, or to reshape older terms in newer language form. ... an encyclopedia is a big fat book that tells you things if you want to. ...

Stylistic features differ among speech communities based on factors such as the group's socioeconomic status, common interests and the level of formality expected within the group and by its larger society. In Western culture, for example, employees at a law office would likely use more formal language than a group of teenage skateboarders because most Westerners expect more formality and professionalism from practitioners of law than from an informal circle of adolescent friends. Speech communities will often change their use of language based on what situation they happen to be in at any given time. The speech of law practitioners is more formal in courtroom proceedings than in everyday office situations, while teenagers speak more formally when their parents are present than when they are not. Stylistics is the study of style used in literary, and verbal language and the effect the writer/speaker wishes to communicate to the reader/hearer. ... ... Leonardo da Vincis Vitruvian Man, for many a symbol of the changes of the Western culture during the Renaissance Western culture refers to the culture that has developed in the Western world. ... A lawyer is a person licensed by the state to advise clients in legal matters and represent them in courts of law and in other forms of dispute resolution. ... Adolescence is the transitional stage of development between childhood and full adulthood (gender-specific manhood, or womanhood), representing the period of time during which a person is biologically adult but emotionally not at full maturity. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

A person can (and almost always does) belong to more than one speech community. For example, a gay Jewish waiter would likely speak and be spoken to differently when interacting with gay peers, Jewish peers, or his co-workers. And if he found himself in a situation with a variety of in-group and/or out-group peers, he would likely modify his speech to appeal to speakers of all the speech communities represented at that moment. In modern society, gay is a word which can be used as either a noun or adjective. ... The word Jew (Hebrew: יהודי transliterated: Yehudi) is used in many ways but generally refers to a follower of Judaism, a child of a Jewish mother, or someone of Jewish descent with a connection to Jewish culture or ethnicity; and often a combination of these attributes. ... A waiter in a resort setting A waiter is a person who waits on tables, often at a restaurant. ... In sociology, an ingroup is a social group towards which an individual feels loyalty and respect, usually due to membership in the group. ...

(A variation on this concept is code-switching, which is usually observed among speakers of two or more languages who swtich between them based on the content or pragmatics of their conversation.) Code-switching is a term in linguistics referring to alternation between one or more languages, dialects, or language registers in the course of discourse between people who have more than one language in common. ... Pragmatics is generally the study of natural language understanding, and specifically the study of how context influences the interpretation of meanings. ...

See also

• Discourse community