Group 2

Discourse and Society

M. Hendri Budiono
Rizka Rachma Pancawati
Hadiyatul Ishlahiyah

Discourse Community
A discourse community is a group of
people who share some kind of
activity such as members of a club or
association who have regular
meeting, or a group of students who
go to classes at the same university.
Member of a discourse community
have particular ways of
communicating with each other.

A person is often a member of

more than one discourse community.
For example: someone may be
1. a university student
2. a member of a student
organization
3. a member of a mosque group.
The ways in which they
communicate in each of these groups
may vary.

There may also be discourse

communities within discourse
communities.
For example:
Within Faculty of Letter and
Humanities, there are two discourse
communities: English Department
and Arabic Department

Speech Community
A speech community in general linguistics
refers to any group of people that speak
the same language and also the variety of
the language. However, it is not essential
that all the members of the speech
community know and use all of these
languages and language varieties. They
will recognize the conditions under which
other members of the community believe
it is appropriate to use each of them.

For example:
In a city such as Surabaya, people will
know and use standard Indonesian. But,
people who were born and grew up in
Surabaya most likely know and speak
Javanese also. And as members of this
speech community, we know when and
where to use Javanese. In some settings
such as at the school, speaking to the
teacher, Indonesian may be more
appropriate. But when we speaking to
our friends, Javanese is appropriate.

Discourse and Language

Choice
Speakers of a speech community may
have a number of languages or language
varieties they use to interacting in their
particular communities.
The choice of language or language
variety may be determined by the
domain the language is being used in,
such as with family, among friends, and
in religion, educational and employment
settings.

Social factors such as:

Who we are speaking to
The social context of the interaction
The topic
Function and goal of the interaction
Social distance between speakers
The formality of the setting
The status of each of the speakers

Also determine the language choice of

the speaker.

Social Class & Social

Network
Social class is subjective, but it can be
identifies such as:
Occupation
Education
Income
Housing and its location

Other factors which may help with social

groupings might include religious
affiliation, leisure time activities and
membership of community organizations.

A group of speakers may appear to be

very similar in terms of social class
membership but differ considerably in
their use of language as they interact
in the social networks.
Social networks may be based, for
example:
Kinship ties
Religious affiliations
Neighborhoods membership
Employee relations and
Spare time activities.

It can be noted that social

networks and social class represent
different orders of generalization
about social organization.
Social class accounts for the
hierarchical structure of society,
Whereas social network deals with
the dimension of solidarity at the
level of the individual and his or her
everyday contacts.

Discourse and Gender

In her book Language and Womens
Place, Lakoff (1975) proposed what
she called womens language ; which
means the use of language that is
different from mens language or
what she termed as neutral
language. Because men dont use
womens language specifically out of
pride of their gender

This language included features

such as:
The use of overly polite forms,
The use of question tags,
Rising intonation in declaratives,
The avoidance of expletives,
A greater use of diminutives and
euphemism,
The use of more hedges and
mitigating devices,
More indirectness,

And the use of particular vocabulary

items such as:
This use of
adorable
language made
charming
women's language
sweet
tentative and
(womens language)
works to keep
versus
women in their
places in society.
great
These differences
terrific
were the results of
cool
mens dominance
(neutral language).
over women.

Discourse and Identity

A person may have a number of
identities, each of which is more
important at different points in time.
For example: a person may have an
identity as a woman, an identity as a
mother, an identity as an office
worker. The ways in which people
display their identities includes the
way they use the language and the
way they interact with people.

However, identities are not natural.

They are constructed, in large part,
through the use of discourse.
Identity, further, is not something
that is fixed and remains the same
throughout a persons life. It is
something that is constantly
constructed and re-constructed as
people interact with each other. Part
of having a certain identity is that it
is recognized by other people. Thus
identity is a two-way construction.