speech community

• speech-community

Probable calque of the German Sprachgemeinschaft.

speech community (plural speech communities)

1. (linguistics) A group of people sharing a language, or a particular way of using that language
   • 1897, William Pierce Shepard, A contribution to the history of the unaccented vowels in Old French‎, page 17:

     The phonetic laws always work without the consciousness of the speech community in which they act ; they are due wholly to physiological causes acting unknown to the will of the individual speaker.

   • 1933, Leonard Bloomfield, Language, page 44:

     Another language of this group, Cantonese, probably ranks among the world's largest speech-communities.

   • 2006, Mary Barrett & Marilyn Davidson, Gender and Communication at Work, page 271:

     Research indicates that men and women in the mainstream US culture tend to form separate speech communities.