From one to many, from many to one: Speech communities in the Muskogee stompdance population.

Abstract

Sociolinguists use speech communities as their units of analysis. While widely used, the concept of the speech community has never been defined precisely. Many sociolinguists assume the populations they study are speech communities because of the ambiguity surrounding what a speech community is, making it difficult to compare findings from various studies.

In this work, discrete definitions for a number of orders of speech communities are offered. The existence of different orders of speech communities are examined in the Muskogee stompdance population. Membership in this group is dependent upon participation in the stompdance religion and, for most people, a Mvskoke (Creek), Seminole, or Yuchi identity. This population, being both socially distinct from other Muskogee populations and heterogeneous, is an analytically interesting group.

Eight orders of speech communities were proposed for the Muskogee stompdance population. Of these, only four were found to exist, the lowest-order, made up of individual grounds (though these were not found to exist among the Yuchi), the penultimate-order, made up of ground clusters, an intermediate-order tribally based speech community, and an intermediate-order language-based speech community. The putative intermediate-order national, generational, and age-based speech communities and the highest-order Muskogee stompdance speech community were not discerned. The analytical utility of those speech communities that were found to exist were also discussed.

Several important points regarding the discernment and use of speech communities were dealt with in this work. First, working from the lowest to the highest orders was found to be most informative, providing high quality, detailed data. Second, the types of social and linguistic criteria used to discern speech communities of different orders were presented. Third, the different orders were shown to be useful in comparing different aspects of linguistic behaviors and ideologies. Finally, a means of dealing with internal heterogeneity was introduced.