Language is both an individual possession and a social possession

Language is both an individual possession and a social possession. We would expect, therefore, that certain individuals would behave linguistically like other individuals: they might be said to speak the same language or the same dialect or the same variety, i.e., to employ the same code, and in that respect to be members of the same speech community, a term probably derived from the German Sprachgemeinschaft. Indeed, much work in sociolinguistics is based on the assumption that it is possible to use the concept of ‘speech community’ without much dif?culty. Hudson (1996, p. 29) rejects that view: ‘our sociolinguistic world is not organized in terms of objective “speech communities,” even though we like to think …show more content…