Types of Linguistic Communities

Comparisons of linguistic and social behavior have been impeded by the fact that linguistic and anthropological studies are rarely based upon comparable sets of data. While the anthropologist's description refers to specific communities, the universe of linguistic analysis is a single language or dialect, a body of verbal signs abstracted from the totality of communicative behavior on the basis of certain structural or genetic similarities. To be sure, studies of individual languages vary greatly in range. They may deal with the speech of a small band of hunters and gatherers, a village dialect, or a literary language spoken by several hundred million speakers. But, on the whole, in selecting the data to be studied linguists give more weight to genetic relationships and structural homogeneity tharx to social environment. We think of English as a single whole, although a typical corpus may include texts stemming from rural England, urban United States, Australia or even former colonial areas of Asia or Africa.