The notion of a Speech Community

Bi/Multilingualism and The Notion of Speech Community: As we have already discussed that the major base of discrimination of speech community is language i.e. those who speak one language are considered to be of one speech community. We have also seen the problem with such definition. Now let us further take this into details and see how such discrimination functions when taken into a realm where people speak two or more than two languages. Canada is a country where majority of its population learns both English, and French. As Canadians know both the languages, which speech community would they belong to, French speech community or English speech community? Let us elaborate this with another example, in India people often speech different languages. It would not be difficult task to find people who speak Hindi, Gujarati, and English. Question is which speech community would these people belong to? One way is to say that people in Hindi speech community (who also know Gujarati and English), people of Gujarati speech community (who also know Hindi and English). But this would not really make much sense. Another way of dealing such problem is the concept of ‘native language’ or ‘mother tongue’. One can say that a person’s native language should define his/her speech community. A Malayalam is of Malayalam speech community, a Gujarati is of Gujarati speech community. It sounds interesting and seems to be the solution of problem. But is it really? In fact not, there are many people who are alien to their native language i.e. they cannot read, write and speak in their mother tongue. It is not rare to find a Gujarati who cannot read, write, and speak in Gujarati. In such scenario how can they be called a member of their native language speech community? In the shadow of such problems it might be appropriate to think in terms of multilingual or bilingual speech community and say that an individual must not be seen as operating with one single language but with verbal repertoire. What does this term ‘verbal repertoire’ mean? Let us discuss. 

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