Speech communities are something that everyone in college is familiar with, but not necessarily by name. The Core Concepts in Cultural Anthropology defines a speech community as Any concrete community of individuals who regularly interact verbally with one another. To elaborate on this, any time you are with a definitively different group of people you talk and act a certain way.
In my own observations of on-campus speech communities I notices that certain individuals were seen interacting with different sets of people. I saw one girl for example from one of my classes approach a teacher about an assignment using proper parlance and acting sophisticated and polite. Later I overheard the same girl talking to some of her friends and the dialogue transformed drastically to fit with her friends. This type of dialogue became much more casual with less emphasis on speaking clearly and more emphasis on getting simple points across. Polite language became replaced with profanities and subject matter became replaced by the events of the past weekend both legal and not legal.
Both of these observations were of the same person, but if you were to see her in one of these communities you might not believe that she was also a member of the other.
Later I saw someone in one of my classes who was always joking and laughing in the back of one of my larger lecture classes at the gym. I was expecting him to be the same type of character and use the same type of jokes and phrases. I was surprised to see him acting and speaking extremely seriously about the proper ways to do a certain workout.
These are just two examples that I observed this week, but I am convinced that there are few people who can actually use the same speech patterns with every single community that they associate with.
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