1. What is a speech community, community of practice, and discourse community?

For this assessment you must select a group of people, then present an initial general description of the group. The group can be based on any aspect of language use: social, institutional, cultural and so on. The group must primarily speak English. Group members must be willing to allow you to record them, although you do not have to record them yet. You must then write a description of the group using key sociolinguistic terms, and provide some hypotheses about how the group’s social variables might affect the group’s language use.

Questions to answer:
1. What is a speech community, community of practice, and discourse
community?
2. Which of those terms best describes your group?
3. What social variables (Swann et al., 2004), also known as speaker variables
(Milroy & Milroy, 1997) characterise members of the group?
4. How might these social variables affect the group’s language use?