Before analyzing how community of practice works, I would like to define some key terms. According to Cambridge dictionary, community is defined as “a group of people with a shared set of activities, practices, beliefs and social structure”. In addition, speech community is often understood as community in which the members of the community share the same features of the language. Furthermore, according to Gumperz (in Wardhaugh 2006:120) “Wherever the relationships between language choice and rules of social appropriateness can be formalized, they allowed us to group relevant linguistic forms into distinct dialects, styles and occupational or other special parlances.”
Firstly, in terms of the reason why “our speech” can be different from “other speech”, I think that this can be due to the fact that community of practice is smaller than speech community. Indeed, more recently, with the increasing of mobility, people have a tendency to move to different places. At that time, the term “speech community” seems not to be appropriate and it has been narrowed down to communities of practices, which are composed of people who: “ develop activities and ways of engaging in those activities, they develop common knowledge and beliefs, ways of relating to each other, ways of talking – in short, practices.”
So we can see that the speech community is a broad term while the community of practice is a smaller term. Furthermore, according to Romaine people may belong to several communities of practice based on “occupational, regional, social, ethnic, foreign language(s), age, race, gender, education, common disabilities or illnesses and perhaps even others”. Take me as an example. Based on the mentioned criteria, I have a number of communities of practice that can impact on the way I speak. Based on my age, my community is teenage who are about 15-25 years old. In this speech community, my speech can be very informal as we can use some slangs, or make jokes, which are barely or not understood by out-group people.
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Another community of practice I can belong to is the community of female students which is defined based on my gender. Besides being able to talk informally, which is quite similar to the first community, I can also bring up personal or intimate topics such as skincare, men or cosmetics, which are quite different from males’ topics. In males’ topics, they prefer more impersonal topics, often based on factual or technical knowledge, such as football, cars or home improvements. The next speech community is built based on my future occupation as an English teacher.
In this speech community, my speech is very formal when teaching students: I would never use slang or bring up personal topics unless necessary and initiated by the person I was talking to. However, my speech community when I am a student at Ulis, we can code-switch without struggling, speak informally and use some jargons related to interpretation naturally. Overall, we can see that based on criteria such as age, race, gender, education, etc. we can define ourselves into a number of communities of practice that we belong to.
References
- Speech Communities and Communities of Practice – Academia.edu
- Speech and Communities – University of Michigan
- Communities of Practice: A Definition and Examination of Human Service Practitioners’ Experiences in a CoP Program – University of Pennsylvania
- The Relationship between the Use of English Language in a Speech Community and Its Integration in the Broader Society: A Comparative Study at Universidad Central de Ecuador – ERIC
- Community of Practice as a State of Mutual Engagement – Pennsylvania State University
