How can we define speech communities in media?
Rong Xiaoqing Reporter from Sing Tao Daily and Jehangir Khattak, Outreach Director at the Center for Community and Ethnic Media came to speak to us for the ninth week of our Community Engagement class.
One topic was raised that I thought were interesting.
Khattak explained how the center works. Basically, communities which have a high percentage of individuals who cannot speak or read English. The premise is to try to make news and information more accessible to these communities by publishing in their native language.
While I think this is a great idea to deliver valuable information to non-English speakers, I believe it overlooks some of the nuances of what a community is.
A speech community, e.g. an Arabic speaking community, is a problematic term because it assumes homogeny in a very large group of speakers.
Let’s stick with the Arabic speaking community for example. While most Arabic speakers can understand each other across their different dialects, they still consider themselves separate communities. Even within a national community, some groups may try to separate themselves from a larger community. This can also reflect in their use of language.
If we are speaking about media that does more than just provide basic information in a certain language, if we are talking about a media that tries to represent, express, and create conversations about identity, then our perception of a speech community has to be a little bit more nuanced.
Since speech communities in the US are becoming more and more complicated, as third generations are straying away from traditional forms of print media and also becoming more and more averse to speaking in English, sociolinguistics can teach us some lessons looking at the behavior of Punjabi speaking teenagers in the work of Ben Rampton. He demonstrates how white English speaking teenagers used Punjabi words in order to be included in the Punjabi speaking group. This is called language crossing.
In light of this, which can be observed across communities and groups, I think media platforms representing or speaking to different speech communities in the US have to address this issue. Just like any aspect of an individual’s identity is complex, their speech is complex too. Media that speaks to them has to keep that in mind, and reflect it.
However, Xiaoqing mentioned how Chinese speakers use different social media platforms such as WeChat. We certainly have to be mindful in terms of which platform we’re using to target any community. And if a speech community of any kind gathers specifically on one platform more than another, then it is worth investigating why they do that and whether that platform should be used as a means of engagement. Still, we need to pay attention to more factors like age, gender, and maybe purpose.
In conclusion, even speech communities are complex and are certainly not an easy unit to study, let alone target through media.
