The Communicative Constitution of Speech Community: the Case of Diaspora Basques in the United States

The act of identifying speech communities has always had a validity problem in the ethnography of communication research. We devise a communication approach to speech communities that recognizes culturally distinct patterns of language use but also regards speech community as an interactional achievement by members of particular collectives responding to rhetorical exigencies. Drawing on the first author's ethnographic fieldwork in the Basque diaspora in the United States, we identify three locally recognized communication practices members used to communicatively constitute a speech community. We argue that community members deployed these practices in response to a threat to community cohesion and identity posed by geographic dispersal. We conclude with a discussion of contributions to scholarship on speech community and social identity.