Social Networks in Speech Community - Essay Example

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF CONDUCTING A STUDY OF A SPEECH COMMUNITY USING THE SOCIAL NETWORK FRAMEWORK By (Name) Class Professor Name of School City and State Date Introduction Speech communities can be defined as groups with similar values and attitudes concerning language and other practices (Milroy, & Margrain 1980). Speech community is very important to the understanding and representation of societies and situations that are ideally characterized by change, groupings, and rapid technological improvements. It is also important in situations that were treated entirely as traditional but have advanced with time. Studying speech community helps in the understanding of human language and trends, and also in making meanings out of the forms of communication within different societies. Interactions within the society form the basis of human contact and language. This work will focus on speech community by providing the advantages and disadvantages of a study on speech community using social networks. Advantages The social networks offer several advantages in the study of speech communities. First, the networks are useful in the investigation of unstable social situations. These unstable social situations are mainly dominant in the cities which are characterizedby a lot of movement. The movement among members of a social network may look like a problem in defining the speech community. However, the procedure for investigating such an unstable social situation does not force the analyst to predict the possible boundaries between the groups. The analyst focuses only on the individual members of the speech community irrespective of their movement over time. It is easier to explain the concept of social behavior using the social networks rather than describing similarities between networks (Coates, & Cameron1989). The network structures provide important information to the researcher on the extent of speech similarity within a given speech community. The high-density personal network structure shows a deeper similarity in language and other factors within a speech community. The members of this structure are closely related and factors that determine their linguistic closeness such as gender and employment status can easily be characterized. The low-density personal network structures offer several challenges in defining the given speech community. Compared to the high-density personal network structure, it is not easy to determine the similarity between the members of the social network and their language (Milroy, & Margrain 1980). Network integration is an important aspect in conducting a study of a given speech community. It requires an in-depth assessment of the different components of a linguistic structure together with the measurement an individual’s level of integration in the community and prediction of its effects on grammatical choices. Sociolinguistic network framework provides efficient methodologies and procedures helpful in establishing these variables. According to Milroy (1980), tightly knit networks clearly support variety maintenance and constructs helpful in pointing out an individual’s degree of integration, particularly in the case of coremembers holding multiple sturdy ties in the network. Conversely, the loosely knit groups in which members are connected mainly by weak ties and individuals have uniplex ties, are less integrated. Depicting vernacular cultures within a speech community can be challenging for researchers who does not apply social network analysis framework. The framework blends quantification techniques with comprehensive qualitative ethnographic descriptions, thus, providing almost exhaustive research avenues for a sociolinguistic researcher. Pinpointing vernacular cultures, therefore, becomes an easy task. Sociolinguistic social network studies can be used to explain the methods that motivate speakers within the social networks to maintain their uniqueness even under pressure. The advancement of multilingual varieties within the city network can easily be characterized using the social network analyses (Coates & Cameron 1989). The interactions among social networks promote the study of speech communities using these networks. According to Milroy, the impact of the social networks on speech community is influenced by the employment status of the members of the social network, gender and the age of the members of the given network. Members of social networks whose speech showed a high intensity of use of vernacular or non-vernacular forms belonged to tight-knit social networks (Milroy 1987). They showed closely linked characteristics in their linguistic characteristics. This was ideally the case for men within the same network. The case was, however, different for the women of a given social network. Women were found to belong to less-dense social networks, and the vernacular, and non-vernacular language forms were less common. This shows the similarity between gender and the nature of the social network in which one may be found. From the research in Belfast, working-class men mostly occupy the close social networks whereas the working class women occupy the less-dense social networks (Milroy 1987). The social classes within the society may determine the nature of the social networks, and therefore the speech communities. The social classes are mainly influenced by the social pressures that operate within the society. The members of the society group themselves into specific social networks depending on the jobs, age and gender. The linguistic categories within a social network are based on the similarities between them. It is therefore not uncommon to find those of a similar age, gender and employment status occupying a similar place in a social network. The network may, therefore, make it easier in studying this population for other linguistic variables (Milroy,1987). Disadvantages One major disadvantage that is observed in using social networks in the study of speech communities is in the interaction between the social networks and the social classes. Social class is just a concept that has been put forth to describe the political, economic and the large-scale divide within the society. The work at Belfast shows that there is a clear link between linguistics and the social class. Labov’s quantitative model makes it easy to study the relation between these variables and the social network. The interactions of the social class and the social networks have been thought to be incompatible. These likely interactions affect the use of the social networks in studying the speech communities. The determination of the size of a social network poses serious challenges in fully characterizing a given population. The total size of a social network helps in describing the behavior of individual members within the network. There are various methods employed in determining the population of a social network. The choice of the method to employ may in itself pose a challenge to the analyst. There is also a possibility of exclusion of members that are crucial to a given social network. This may affect the data collected for classifying different populations into specific speech communities (Milroy, & Milroy1992). Many network studies fail to discuss the ideas of coalitionsand communities of practice when defining the social networks.Coalitions refer to dense structures is social networks that are formed by the networks intentionally. A community of practice refers to an aggregate of people that team up around a given enterprise. The coalitions and communities of practice are for particular purposes or situations for the benefit of the social networks that are involved. Failure of inclusion of coalitions and communities of practice in the studies may lead to wrong interpretation of the results. They may be viewed as a single class, which may show a great variability in their characteristics. This leads to many differences that are not in harmony with the social network theories (Milroy, &Margrain 1980). Different speech communities have varied linguistic behaviors based on multilingual sets of connections. This necessitates the need to develop network indicators helpful in studying the correlations among the speech community members. Using the social network framework to come up with these variables is a challenging task for a researcher, mainly, because of the inability of the technique to espouse a definite structure of a linguistic network. According to Milroy(1987),the structure of a network holds a lot of significance in studying an individual’s linguistic behavior. As such, the framework is expected to come up with network indicators capable of distinguishing various strengths of network ties while allowing the application of discerning composite or multiplex networks together with the uniplex networks. In uniplex networks, the primary groups coincide in a limited extent. For multiplex networks, however, the same people exist in a variety of primary groups. For instance, a friend being a colleague or neighbor. The social network framework fails to distinguish these network indicators during the studies of speech communities. Further, for a researcher interested in mapping the effects of a speech community’s networks on their language use or in adjusting the methodological apparatus of Network Analysis to suit the situation on the ground case, considering employment of experiences of previoussociolinguistic network studies would be paramount under this technique. All these procedures not only makes it monotonous and involving, but also alludes to the fact that it requires a lot of care, skills, and professional judgment; qualities which the researcher may lack. For many reasons, it is not quite certain whether quantification in social network framework is a procedure. One of the weaknesses of the technique as evident in Milroy’s study is the supposition that a high correspondence between the use of a particular linguistic variable and the integration value is indubitably a pointer to the variant’s social emblematic value within a network. Additionally, the scores under the social network analysis do not give room for keeping of the two aspects of multiplexity and density apart. For example, an individual sharing a workplace with two more persons of the same sex and neighborhood is likely to be interpreted as integrated into the particular community. Another problem with social network(s) in speech community studies is the absence of a discrete identity, especially when used with a community in which the distinctive group identity or solidarity is extremely weak (Sarhimaa 2009). The ethnic identity is not usually based on background but locality rather. People feel great solidarity towards their immediate networks like families friends, kin, and neighbors, with no specific regard for ethnicity. Consequently, one of the problems is finding a sound way to manage the fact that divergent to conventional sociolinguistic network studies on bilingual contexts, the ethnic and linguistic background of other members of social networks of a particular speech community often becomes highly variegated Every kind of communication network in sociolinguistics should take into account the distinction between the rising and dormant networks. The networks can be of great benefit in defining populations in the studies of speech communities and language shifts. The disadvantages that arise in using social networks in studying speech communities can be avoided by simple changes and hardwork by the analyst. References Coates, J., & Cameron, D. (1989). Women in their speech communities: new perspectives on language and sex. London, Longman. Milroy, L. (1987). Language and social networks. Oxford, UK, B. Blackwell. Milroy, L., &Margrain, S. (1980). Vernacular language loyalty and social network. [Belfast], [Northern Ireland Polytechnic]. Milroy, L., & Milroy, J. (1992).Social Network and Social Class: Toward an Integrated Sociolinguistic Model. Language in Society. 21, 1-26. Sarhimaa, A., 2009. Social Network Theory as a framework for studying minor Finnic languages with special reference to Karelian. The Quasquicentennial of the Finno-Ugrian Society. Helsinki, pp.161-190. Read More