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9 - Performance and play in speech communities
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Speech Communities
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- 20 February 2014, pp 132-147
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Chapelle:I’m not saying I don't like police. I’m saying I’m just scared of them. Some times we want to call them too. Somebody broke into my house once – but I didn't want to call the police, Uhhh uhhh. [My] house was too nice! And in a real nice house – they'd never believe I lived in it!Police:“He's still here! Thump! Ohhh my God! Open and shut case Johnson! I saw this once before when I was a rookie. Apparently this ni**ga broke in and hung pictures of his family everywhere. Well…let's sprinkle some crack on him and get out of here.”
(Dave Chapelle 2000)In 2000, when Dave Chapelle performed a comedy routine depicting his imagined arrest by police who thought he had broken into his own house and hung photographs of his family on the wall, those outside of the African American speech community may have thought that it was a brilliant comedic representation of police abuse, but an impossible one. Yet nine years later, the Cambridge, Massachusetts police arrested Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for breaking and entering his own home – with pictures of his family and one of himself alongside Nelson Mandela on the wall!
3 - Constructing speech communities
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Speech Communities
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- 20 February 2014, pp 36-49
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This chapter introduces some of the language and discourse styles and social factors that help define and identify specific speech communities. As we have seen in previous chapters, there are numerous activities and interactions within and between members of speech communities that can be ongoing and involve multiple participants. There are also numerous speech events and verbal genres that are framed and sequenced and determined by role and status of participants, norms of interactions, expectation of content, etc. At issue here is not only how people form speech communities and learn how to function competently as members, but also where they form their communities.
Participating in speech communities requires “learning how to mean” (cf. Halliday 1978) according to norms and details of language, discourse and ideology, and rules and goals of engagement. As discussed in Chapter 2, when speech communities are viewed as having physical boundaries, there may be disputes and claims to public spaces and places that signify power and full membership in society. There may also be claims to spaces that are imagined (cf. Anderson 1983), such as online communities that are constructed around and include many of the same social issues found in the physical world. In either case we understand that speech communities exist through participation and as a result of socialization about how to be a member of a social group. In order to participate fully one must develop “communicative competence” in the use of conventions, practices and ideologies of specific speech communities in order to navigate the social world and all its complexities.
Transcription Conventions
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Speech Communities
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1 - What are speech communities?
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Speech Communities
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The study of speech communities is central to the understanding of human language and meaning. Speech communities are groups that share values and attitudes about language use, varieties and practices. These communities develop through prolonged interaction among those who operate within these shared and recognized beliefs and value systems regarding forms and styles of communication. While we are born with the ability to learn language, we do so within cultures and societies that frame the process of learning how to talk to others. This framing once exclusively occurred as face-to-face interactions within communities of speakers. Constant relocation, mass migration, transmigration, ever-evolving technology and globalization have transformed many societies and increased the need to provide more detailed descriptions and theories regarding the nature of speech communities. The importance of our growing understanding of speech communities remains one of the most significant projects faced by those interested in language, discourse and interaction. This chapter defines and identifies types of speech communities, provides the history of the term and examines its importance to the study of language and discourse in general.
The concept of speech community does not simply focus on groups that speak the same language. Rather, the concept takes as fact that language represents, embodies, constructs and constitutes meaningful participation in society and culture. It also assumes that a mutually intelligible symbolic and ideological communicative system must be at play among those who share knowledge and practices about how one is meaningful across social contexts. Thus as peoples relocate away from their families and home communities and build others, relationships and interactions continue and change, and are sustained through the use of evolving technology and media that enhances, recognizes and re-creates communities. These interactions constitute the substance of human contact and the importance of language, discourse and verbal styles in the representation and negotiation of the relationships that ensue. It is within speech communities that identity, ideology and agency are actualized in society.
7 - Online speech communities
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Speech Communities
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- 20 February 2014, pp 98-113
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This chapter explores the concept of speech community within online technology, virtual communication, media systems and institutions, social networks, communication frames, and symbolic representations and social constructions. It examines the various ways that the Internet affects and builds communities around youth culture, language, discourse, gender and sexuality, and racial and ethnic identity. As the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig argues in his book Free Culture, the Internet was built based on the tradition of free will, speech, markets, trade, enterprise and elections (2005: xiv). It developed as a culture that would be available to anyone to use, irrespective of where they are, or who they are, or what they have or don't have. The freedom of the Internet has allowed people to connect with existing communities and create new communities of interlocutors who have redefined our notion of friendship, boundaries, protest, advocacy, education, sharing and communication itself. These online speech communities have developed through an emphasis on language and discourse style, indexicality and multiple levels of intertextuality. Thus online users are, as Danet and Herring state, “members of one or more speech communities who bring to their online encounters shared knowledge, values, and expectations for linguistic interaction” (2007: 7).
Identifying speech communities
On September 2, 2005, I was on the faculty of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California and directing the Hiphop Archive. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a category-three hurricane in southeastern Louisiana. Katrina became one of the most destructive and deadly hurricanes in US history. The majority of deaths occurred due to the storm surge, and in New Orleans, Louisiana the levees did not hold. At least 1800 people died.
8 - Language in and out of the classroom
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Speech Communities
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- 20 February 2014, pp 114-131
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This chapter focuses on language socialization and how nations and educational systems interact with speech communities through formal aspects of language policy. Knowing and learning how to communicate is the essence of social and cultural life for children in any society. They learn how to navigate their speech communities through caretakers who teach children how to speak, when to speak, where to speak and how to think about their speech community and language(s). This chapter describes the relationship between speech community belief and values, and educational policy. It explores youth language in public and urban settings, educational and literacy issues, and controversies including important debates on African American English (AAE) in US schools.
Language standards
While members of non-dominant speech communities often acknowledge and incorporate the standard language, they seldom have access to the social knowledge associated with it. It is during the teaching of literacy, math, science, art, etc. that educational institutions also institutionalize a language standard as the dominant and prestige variety as it socializes children to the norms of cultural and communicative hegemony (cf. Briggs 1986). Educational institutions not only convey specific and specialized knowledge, but also the assumption that the prestige variety is more valuable than that acquired in the conversations and activities of those who do not characterize the dominant language (e.g. Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Woolard 1985). In fact, Bourdieu writes: “Integration into a single ‘linguistic community’, which is a product of the political domination that is endlessly reproduced by institutions capable of imposing universal recognition of the dominant language, is the condition for the establishment of relations of linguistic domination” (1991: 46).
Speech Communities
- Marcyliena H. Morgan
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What makes a speech community? How do they evolve? How are speech communities identified? Speech communities are central to our understanding of how language and interactions occur in societies around the world and in this book readers will find an overview of the main concepts and critical arguments surrounding how language and communication styles distinguish and identify groups. Speech communities are not organized around linguistic facts but around people who want to share their opinions and identities; the language we use constructs, represents and embodies meaningful participation in society. This book focuses on a range of speech communities, including those that have developed from an increasing technological world where migration and global interactions are common. Essential reading for graduate students and researchers in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.
4 - The African American speech community
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Speech Communities
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African American English (AAE) is important to African American people. It is about ideas, art, ideology, love and memory. Whether they celebrate or criticize AAE, its continued presence is indisputable evidence of what they have been through and achieved in society today. The speaker who relies on its most vernacular form represents his or her social world and the encroachments of racism, inadequate education systems and class inequities. The successful adult who claims an allegiance to standard, “good” speech uses language as proof that the escape from racism is successful and over. The teenager who confronts and confounds the world with language games and verbal usage that celebrates the dialect is recognizing its power to both simultaneously represent a generation and defy authority. The college student and computer specialist who uses elite speech when working with others and AAE when theorizing and plotting to build an empire is using every creative linguistic resource to build a future. The US president who is constantly attacked in terms of identity and citizenship uses it to demonstrate that he understands what is going on. AAE is part and parcel of social, cultural and political survival.
Contact and the African American speech community
Discussions of language contact in earlier chapters have alluded to the extreme circumstances that can result from the often violent meeting of peoples and their languages. Discussion of the development of the African American speech community and its survival provides an important example of how speech communities often develop, and how dialect difference and language itself may become the context that represents and condemns the contact. The African American speech community refers to the community of speakers whose African ancestors experienced plantation slavery in the US. According to Eltis and Richardson (2007), between 1525 and 1866 an estimated 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Some 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Only about 388,000 Africans were shipped directly to North America. According to Henry Louis Gates (2013), some believe that another 60,000 to 70,000 Africans were taken to the US after arriving in the Caribbean, making the total approximately 450,000 Africans who arrived in the US over the course of the slave trade.
Bibliography
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- 20 February 2014, pp 158-185
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10 - Power, ideology and prejudice
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Speech Communities
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- 20 February 2014, pp 148-157
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This chapter is concerned with identity and ideological positions that develop within speech communities. It explores the concept of language ideology in terms of dominance, resistance, representation, power and control. It is concerned with language loyalty, identity, and how these are ratified across different formations of speech communities. More directly, this chapter focuses on the role of the speech community in the critique of power relationships and interactions where bigotry and injustice are suspected. It will explore the relationship between power and powerful speech through reviews and critiques of theories of language, culture, and identity as they relate to ethnicity, race, gender, and nationalism.
The Global Speech Community
While it is true that one can be a member of multiple speech communities, it is also true that the extent of participation may vary depending on what one knows and understands about the norms that might shape the discursive practices unique to each community. The task is to grasp the intertextuality between and within speech communities in order to unpack the knowledge that makes a speech community member competent. This challenge is illustrated in the words and images of Le Bien, Le Mal – The Good, The Bad, a hiphop song by the late US hiphop artist Guru and the French hiphop artist MC Solaar. In Morgan (2001) the global reach of what is often called “The Hiphop Nation” is explored through the song's linguistic, musical and spatial merging of Paris and New York/Brooklyn. The prelude to the Guru-Solaar music video collaboration Le Bien, Le Mal includes a mobile phone call from MC Solaar – in Paris and speaking French to Guru – in Brooklyn and speaking English. They are not simply speaking French and English but rather MC Solaar's French includes verlan – urban French vernacular that incorporates movement of syllables and deletion of consonants. Guru's English is laced with Hiphop terminology and African American English (AAE) as he talks to MC Solaar. Yet in spite of these obvious differences they communicate ‘perfectly’ and arrange to meet in a Paris/New York space that can only be Hiphop.
2 - Representing speech communities
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
(Morrison 1994: 15)Irrespective of when nations are formed, their emergence as a speech community and their establishment and enforcement of a national language occur as acts of sacrifice, loss and gain. This chapter considers the question of what frames and characterizes speech communities that come together as the result of domination, mutual endeavor, personal ties and collective identities. The importance of this analysis is at the heart of Toni Morrison's 1993 Lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature (published the following year). While all social actors belong to speech communities, every interaction is not based on membership in one community or another. Speech communities are not organized around linguistic facts but around people who want to share their opinions, identities, thoughts and solidarities, and generally communicate with their evolving social world. Although many people operate within multiple speech communities, they do so in order to participate in the “mutual exchange of words and ideas” and to represent their identity(ies) as full social actors. Speech communities may develop as the result of force and political contact where language ideology is promoted and imposed by those in power.
Acknowledgments
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Index
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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6 - Voice and empowerment in gender and sexuality
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Speech Communities
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- 20 February 2014, pp 84-97
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This chapter is concerned with the language, discourse and social aspects of women's speech communities and the effects of linguistic and discourse features that are indexed as gendered. It is also concerned with changes and emerging issues in speech community norms regarding gender and sexuality. Across cultures, different communication styles flourish at various levels of complexity in terms of language use and semiotic resources. The language and interaction practices of gendered speech communities are not special and unique to women. Rather, they are practices that are indexed in societies and culture as women's speech. These range from the poetry of Bedouin society (Abu-Lughod 2000), the wedding songs of British Gujarati women (Edwards and Kaatbamna 1989) and the signifying laughter of African American women (Morgan 2002, 2003) to online communities that mirror gender stereotypes in face-to-face-interactions (Herring 2005). This chapter reveals how language mediates and constructs identity, how we associate language with gender and sexuality, and how values and attitudes regarding gender are represented, enforced, resisted and manipulated. To answer these questions, this chapter focuses on both public and popular culture and African American women's speech.
Women and place
Speech communities that are formed around women's lives, groups and activities abound throughout the world. This is true even though many women live in societies where, because of their gender, their voices are treated as different from those of men. As social dominance theory argues (Sidanius and Pratto 2001), group hierarchies ranging from dominant to subordinate are common in all cultures and societies. Ideologies and myths that legitimize inequitable status also circulate within most societies. These ideologies include beliefs, attitudes, values, stereotypes, and rituals that justify practices and policies that benefit dominant and powerful collectives. Therefore it is not surprising that Sidanius and Pratto (2001) have also found that, in relation to gender, social dominance orientation tends to be elevated in men, who tend to be involved in authoritarian roles such as the police, military and business that exacerbate the hierarchy. At the same time, women tend to be involved in roles such as caregiver, social worker, etc. that attenuate this hierarchy (Pratto 2005).
Contents
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Frontmatter
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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5 - Youth communities: the Hiphop Nation
- Marcyliena H. Morgan, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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This chapter investigates the linguistic, discourse and ideological aspects of the Hiphop speech community in the US and globally. The hiphop speech community is largely made up of youth who function both as an imagined cultural community and, just as importantly, as a community of imagination. As Morgan and Bennett argue, hiphop's “artistic and linguistic practices are not merely part of its culture, but the central driving force that defines and sustains it” (2011: 12). Members assume that there are others that communicate and participate in similar activities and practices. The use of the term “Hiphop Nation” to describe the citizens of the global Hiphop cultural community has not been officially declared, but it is increasingly common. Citizenship in the Hiphop Nation is not defined by conventional national, social or racial boundaries, but by a commitment to Hiphop's multimedia arts culture that represents the social and political lives of its members (Forman and Neal 2004; Keyes 2004; Morgan 2009c). Moreover, because most Hiphop artists are self-taught or taught by peers in the Hiphop community, it has empowered young people from all socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in their own right.
The Hiphop speech community
Irrespective of where in the world one finds Hiphop, it incorporates local, national and culturally marked symbols to represent space, place and context. The term Hiphop refers to the artistic elements of: (1) deejaying and turntablism; (2) the delivery and lyricism of rapping and MCing; (3) breakdancing and other forms of Hiphop dance; (4) graffiti art and writing; and (5) a “fifth element” that unites them all – knowledge. Hiphop knowledge refers to the cultural, aesthetic, social, linguistic, intellectual and political identities, beliefs, behaviors and values produced and embraced by its members, who generally think of Hiphop as an identity, a worldview and a way to say the truth. American writer and social activist Kevin Powell (2003) explains the Hiphop lifestyle:
When I say I am a hiphop head, I mean that I speak hiphop, I dress hiphop, I walk hiphop, I think out of the box, like hiphop, and that, as KRS-One famously said, I am hiphop. And I understand that hiphop, really, is a reaction to the failures of the United States government to help poor people, since it was poor people who created hiphop in the first place, and that hiphop is also a reaction to racism and oppression.
(Powell 2003)