Speech Community Research Paper

Because it is so difficult to define what a speech community is precisely, I’m not sure exactly how many specific speech communities I belong to. There may be speech communities within my speech communities that I’m not even aware of, or speech communities that overlap. In this essay, I will discuss one particular speech community and one of its sub-communities.

The general definition of a speech community is pretty hard to define, but I think Gumperz does a good job in covering the overall sense of it. He says the speech community is, “any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage." I found this

definition to be especially valid in defining one of my embarrassingly most prominent speech communities, the fangirl community. “Fangirl culture” is a global phenomenon that has gained popularity in recent years among (mostly) females ages twelve to around twenty-five via the internet. Self-proclaimed fangirls are distinguished by their obsessive enthusiasm, usually over celebrities and prominent pop culture figures. Because this community thrives mainly through the internet and social media, it's lexical rules are what distinguishes it from regular day to day speech. Therefore if by "verbal signs" Gumperz means spoken words, this definition may not fit the fangirl speech community. There are instances when fangirls exchange spoken words unique to the fangirl speech community, for example at a concert or over the phone; but since members of this community communicate mostly through social media, expressions such as "asdfghjkl" (which is a common phrase(?) that denotes extreme excitement) do not easily translate into oral language.
In his definition, Gumperz goes on to say, “ The verbal behavior of such groups always constitutes a system.

It must be based on finite sets of grammatical rules that underlie the production of well-formed sentences, or else messages will not be intelligible.” Yet the fangirl speech community does the exact opposite of this; it is an interesting case because it rejects standard English grammatical rules in an “anything goes” sort of fashion. For example, if a member of the fangirl community were to say, “I just finished watching episode one of this show and I’m dead; I literally cannot even,” other members of the fangirl community would right away understand that this person is overwhelmed with amusement, while people unfamiliar with fangirl terminology would be confused as to why the girl said she was dead and whether or not the phrase “I literally cannot even” was intentionally left unfinished or whether it is a grammatical mistake. It is then difficult for people outside of the fangirl community to understand why words are purposefully misspelled and sentences are intentionally left unfinished. My own parents have asked me before what the phrase “I can’t even” means. An unofficial definition on the Urban Dictionary says that it is, “The complete, sudden onset of the cessation of brain activity, brought under the presence of acute stress, which fully affects the person only a short time after it strikes them. Said person, under the duress of the symptoms, demonstrate their

affliction by alerting to others that they ‘can't even’, in reference to their inability to deal with the symptoms, or their inability to perform simple actions which have been made impossible by their afflictions.”
Within the fangirl speech community there are thousands of individual speech communities.

One sub-community in particular has gained recent popularity, the Hallyu wave speech community. The Hallyu wave (also known as the Korean wave) is a name to describe the recent “wave” of interest in South Korean culture in countries all over the world. This speech community is very unique its structure. One question that has been raised in class is, “Can people from different countries who speak different languages share the same speech community?” With the Hallyu Wave, the answer is a definite “yes”. In Gumperz’ definition of a speech community, he says, “Most groups of any permanence, be they small bands bounded by face-to-face contact, modern nations divisible into smaller subregions, or even occupational associations or neighborhood gangs, may be treated as speech communities.” But since this statement was made in the 1960s, it fails to recognize the internet as a mode of communication. The Hallyu wave is a speech community that lives on the internet since many of its fans live in countries outside of South Korea. Since Korean culture is not as widely acknowledged in the United States, many Korean pop fans face the problem of not knowing anyone with the same interests as them in their daily lives. For this reason, they bond with other people on the internet, many of whom come from countries outside of the U.S. But what is most interesting about the Hallyu Wave community is that

when one fan meets another for the first time, they automatically form a bond unique to the Hallyu fangirl community. Two people from separate parts of the world are able to bond over a culture that is not theirs. Perhaps it is because of the scarcity of Korean influences in mainstream Western culture that people of this community get excited to share their passion for it and take any chance they get to do so. I have personally found this to be true. Many of the friendships I have made were over South Korean culture. When I met my friends for the first time, knowing they were as into the Hallyu Wave as I was, it would appear to other people that we’ve known each other for years even though we had only just met each other.
Although Gumperz’ definition of a speech community was made decades ago, it is still relevant to speech communities today. With the invention of the internet and social media as a mode of communication and the ever-changing understanding of the English language, Gumperz’ definition becomes a bit less accurate in defining some modern speech communities such as the fangirl speech community and within the fangirl speech community, the Hallyu Wave community.