way sociolinguists try to get at this dynamic view of social groups is with the idea that speakers participate in various communities of practice. Eckert and McConnell‐Ginet (1998, 490) define a community of practice as ‘an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagements in some common endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short, practices – emerge in the course of their joint activity around that endeavor.’ A community of practice is at the same time its members and what its members are doing to make them a community: a group of workers in a factory, an extended family, an adolescent friendship group, a women’s fitness class, a Kindergarten classroom, and so on. They add (1998, 490): ‘Rather than seeing the individual as some disconnected entity floating around in social space, or as a location in a network, or as a member of a particular group or set of groups, or as a bundle of social characteristics, we need to focus on communities of practice.’ (See Meyerhoff and Strycharz 2013 for additional details.) It is such communities of practice that shape individuals, provide them with their identities, and often circumscribe what they can do. Eckert (1988, 2000) used this concept in her research in a Detroit‐area high school and Mendoza‐Denton (2008) also used it in her work with groups of Latina girls in California. These variationist sociolinguistic studies will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5.
One study which makes use of the community of practice construct for the study of language and identities is Bucholtz (1999), an investigation of the language of ‘nerd girls’ in a US high school. Bucholtz notes the following ways in which the concept of speech community is inadequate for research on language gender:
1 Its tendency to take language as central.
2 Its emphasis on consensus as the organizing principle of community.
3 Its preference for studying central members of the community over those at the margins.
4 Its focus on the group at the expense of individuals.
5 Its view of identity as a set of static categories.
6 Its valorization of researchers’ interpretations over participants’ own understandings of their practices. (1999, 207)
Bucholtz argues that within the community of practice framework, we can define a social group by all social practices, not just language. This concept can also incorporate the idea that there may be conflict within a group about these practices and norms, and thus marginal members of communities, as individuals, can be better included in the analysis. Further, as we will discuss below, this does not put speakers into pre‐existing identity categories, but focuses instead on their own construction of identity. Finally, through ethnographic research, it allows for the analysis to focus on how the speakers themselves, not the researcher, enact group memberships.
In this study on nerd girls, Bucholtz notes how the girls both conform to the larger social order (i.e., by focusing on academic achievement) and also resist it (i.e., by rejecting traditional ideas of femininity in dress and appearance). The values of the members of this community of practice are not set norms which define them, but rather are negotiated through ongoing social practices, that is, their interactions serve to define what a nerd is and how the various members of their group fit in this category.
This concept of authenticity in an identity category can also be found in Jones (2011), who writes about the construction of an ‘(in)authentic lesbian’ identity within a lesbian women’s community of practice, in which ‘girly’ practices were deemed less authentic than ‘dykey’ ones.
There are also studies which seek to expand on the community of practice concept of conflict, not consensus, as part of interaction. Davies (2005, 1) argues that the idea of legitimacy is central in community of practice analyses and power structures cannot be ignored: ‘While practices may define the community, the community determines who has access to that practice.’ Moore (2006) looks at narratives told among high school students in the northwest of England, noting that status inequalities can lead to inequitable allocation of control within a community of practice, and that such hierarchies must be taken into account in the study of community‐building and identity construction. (See Gee 2005 for a further discussion of this issue and the usefulness of the community of practice approach for linguistic studies.)
The community of practice framework has also been used to study online communities (Angouri 2016). Early research explicitly focused on the development of norms; Herring (2001, 622), in an article reviewing research on computer‐mediated communication, writes: ‘Over time, computer‐mediated groups develop norms of practice regarding “how things are done” and what constitutes socially desirable behavior; these may then be codified in “Frequently Asked Question” documents (FAQs …) and netiquette guidelines.’ Other aspects of research which make reference to norm development are within the area of pragmatics, looking at how (im)politeness expectations are negotiated in online contexts (e.g., Graham 2007; Locher 2010; Kavanagh 2016). (See chapter 4 for further discussion of pragmatics and politeness theory.)
Another theme in research employing the community of practice framework and online contexts is the focus on the emergence of communities and the negotiation of individual identities with regard to community membership (Georgakopoulou 2006). For example, Cochrane (2017) examines how community‐building takes place through blogs of wheelchair users. There is increasing focus on online communities for language learning purposes, including networks of language teachers; see England (2018) for an overview of this for TESOL. (See also Eckert and McConnell‐Ginet 2007 for a further discussion of this aspect of communities of practice, i.e., the positioning of their members with relation to the world beyond the community of practice.)
Social Networks
Another way of viewing how an individual relates to other individuals in society is to ask what social networks he or she participates in. That is, how and on what occasions does a specific individual A interact now with B, then with C, and then again with D? How intensive are the various relationships: does A interact more frequently with B than with C or D? How extensive is A’s relationship with B in the sense of how many other individuals interact with both A and B in whatever activity brings them together? In a situation in which A, B, C, D, and E are linked in a network, do they all have links to each other or are B, C, D, and E only linked to A but not each other? How people in a social network are linked to each other is one way of viewing social groups as defined by the kinds, frequency, and constellation of social interactions.
Research on social networks in sociolinguistics has proliferated in the last few decades, but is most directly linked to Milroy (1980, 1987; Milroy and Llamas 2013). This work adapted sociological social network theory to sociolinguistics and showed how it could be used in the study of language. Different types of social networks contribute to different pattern of language variation and change (a topic which will be addressed in more detail in chapter 5). You are said to be involved in a dense social network if the people you know and interact with also know and interact with one another. If they do not do so, the social network is a loose one. You are also said to be involved in a multiplex social network if the people within it are tied together in more than one way, that is, not just through work but also through other social activities. People who go to school together, marry each other’s siblings, and work and play together participate in dense multiplex networks. (To see diagrams of these different types of networks, see the page for social network theory on English Language and Linguistics Online, http://www.ello.uos.de/).
In England multiplex social networks are said to
