Social Membrane

This is the term I coined.

First I would like to respond to the question in our last class meeting, "what is a community?"

I try to come up with a definition, and that is, a group of people with a set of shared values/rules that include and exclude. I notice how it corresponds to Labov's (1972) words that "any marked agreement in the use of language elements,... in a set of shared norms." (120-1)

I start with a disregard to geographic factor because of my familiarity with virtual community, and my belief that geographical influences, though in most cases does plays a crucial role, with the advent of rapid developments in communication technology, are more or less eclipsed. And I would say more, not less.

Then I go back to the idea of inclusive-/exclusiveness. What I think of as a mechanism that works like a membrane that controls all the in and out of an organism unit is in effect comprised of several factors such as speakers' attitudes and community members' identity, etc. Even if I seem to be qualified as a speech community in a strict sense of linguistic mutual intelligibility, whether or not my values, cultural ones in particular, are commensurate with insiders' determine the inclusion or exclusion of me.

References:

Labov, W. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. University of Pennsylvania Press.