speech community

noun

, Linguistics.

1. the aggregate of all the people who use a given language or dialect.
2. a group of people geographically distributed so that there is no break in intelligibility from place to place.

speech community

noun

1. a community consisting of all the speakers of a particular language or dialect

Word History and Origins

Origin of speech community¹

First recorded in 1930–35

Example Sentences

“We create a speech community among our peers, and not across generations. So that generation that felt the slur will still feel it.”

From Los Angeles Times

“And yet it is the lexicon, it is the vocabulary that is the most imitated and celebrated — but not with the African American speech community being given credit for it.”

From New York Times

Linguists talk about the phenomenon of “accommodation”— which is the way in which we seek to adapt our own language to fit into a speech community.

From Literature

What makes this a sensitive topic in education is that our most widely used allusions reflect the culture and history of the dominant "speech community."

From US News

On Monday, Calvert got an answer, but it wasn’t nearly what he or many others in the free speech community had hoped.

From Time