Page 472 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

450 Saskia Corder and Miriam Meyerhoff

nal perceptions about what the relevant social categories are within the commu-
nity. Even where the social categories represent distinctions that the community
seems to consider salient (such as middle vs. working class; women vs. men;
urban vs. rural), it has been argued that large-scale groupings mask internal
variability within the groups, and impose a deterministic view of social iden-
tities on the subsequent analysis.
Another source of concern is that the methods associated with defining and
analysing variation in a speech community actually hinder meaningful interpre-
tation of any variability that the research uncovers. Take for example, the
widely-recognized generalization that if a variant is more frequently used by
speakers from higher socio-economic strata, then it is also more frequently used
by all speakers (regardless of their socio-economic class) in careful or out-
group-directed speech. An analysis of a speech community can describe this,
and the researcher may suggest various reasons for this correlation between
style and class. For example, one explanation for the correlation might be that
people want to suggest they come from a high social class when they are talking
to strangers or in a formal context. Another explanation might be that people be-
lieve higher class speakers usually hold positions in the wider community which
license them to speak in the most formal social contexts, and individuals draw
on this generalization when they have to speak formally. Yet another expla-
nation might be that formal contexts remind people of being at school, where
use of formal and standard varieties is explicitly taught.
Within the framework of the analysis of the speech community, we can do
no more than postulate what social motivations underlie the facts we observe.
We certainly cannot choose between any one of these accounts when we are
analysing speakers in the large groups associated with studies of speech com-
munities. And increasingly, sociolinguists would argue that the causes of the
widespread correlation between style and class are most likely to be a combi-
nation of all these factors (and perhaps more).
On the other hand, within the closer community of practice analysis of
speakers’ attitudes and how they orient to and interpret social meaning through
a wide range of linguistic and non-linguistic behaviours, sociolinguists acquire
an understanding of what it means to be ‘middle class’, or what it means for par-
ticular ways of speaking to be ‘careful’ or ‘good’. Bucholtz (1999) provides a
nice example of this in her study of an all-female community of practice of high
school students who self-identified as ‘nerds’. This community of practice con-
structed a range of linguistic (and non-linguistic) resources that marked them
out from other communities of practice in the school, for instance by using low
frequency and technical vocabulary, avoidance of swearing, and an adherence to
more standard-like syntax. (In section 4, we return to the uses that analyses of
this level of detail might have for applied sociolinguists.)