Mary bucholtz why be normal summary

Bucholtz begins by noting how the study of speech communities examine language at the macro level, and mentions this model is not grounded in a larger theory.

In this view, practice consists of reproducing social arrangements. Bucholtz then discusses Certeau, who considered speakers more agentive, yet did not explain how culturally shared resources such as language are made to serve the specific social needs of individuals. The final theorist discussed is Ortner, who relates practice to women by viewing structure itself as a textual field within which speakers operate.

The next section of the article continues to critique the concept of the speech community, noting that it is deficient in examining gender. Some of these criticisms include that the speech community is too focused on central members, has a static view of identity categories, overlooks interaction between speech communities, and privileges the group over the individual.

The article continues by discussing how a community of practice framework can examine conflicts and marginal members in a community by showing multiplicities of identities on display. Bucholtz proposes a framework to classify these practices: negative identity practices, which individuals use to distance themselves from a rejected identity, and positive identity practices, which individuals participate in to construct a chosen identity. Negative identity practices included less participation in the California vowel shift, resistance to slang, and resistance to colloquial or nonstandard phonology and syntax.

Positive identity practices that the girls used included hypercorrect pronunciation, punning, and formal lexical items. Are you sure you want to use this? For standard page creation, see "How to edit or create pages" above. She does this by first giving several definitions, as provided by published linguists, of the speech community framework and identifying the limitations in each.

She then gives several definitions of the community of practice model and points out its triumphs over the former model. Finally, she describes her own case study, of a community of nerd girls in a California high school, to showcase the use of the tools available to linguists using the community of practice model that are unavailable to those using the speech community model. Her overarching argument is that the speech community, with its emphasis on language, leads to a rather ignorant analysis of any communal phenomenon that might involve gender, class, or culture.

Bucholtz initializes the discussion of the speech community model by mentioning work done by the sociolinguist Labov who reasoned that all residents of New York City are part of the same speech community, even though they often speak different languages, since they all share knowledge of rules for conduct and interpretation of speech.

In other words, language is socially structured, and it is not by sheer coincidence that New Yorkers have a similar manner of speech. This is what the speech community model is good for, according to Bucholtz, showing that heterogeneity in speech is the culmination of the formation of a speech community. She contends that this speech community model is okay for traditional sociolinguists who want to use theory to explain social phenomena, but that it is not good for, say, gender and language sociolinguists who want to look at the phenomena and see how it reflects theory.

The next two discussions that Bucholtz cites are the culmination of work done by two French linguists, Bourdieu and Certeau. Habitus is the set of actions and individuals might do, like speak, eat, read, etc.

Hexis is the set of socially meaningful gestures, stances, and other physical self-representations that participants might use. The main point that he makes, though, is that non-linguistic practices are also important because they often carry linguistic meaning. Bucholtz likes this idea because it is pointing out one of the limitations of speech community, the negligence of anything non-linguistic.

Referring to whichever social structure the practices are linked. Thus, using the three discussions, Bucholtz prepares a list of six limitations of the speech community model.

In simpler terms, the speech community model only analyzes language, and not other, non-linguistic forms of communication. The model assumes that the community is made up of people trying to conform to some standard that everybody has unanimously agreed upon. The model also just discusses the group as a whole, as if everybody thinks alike and has the same goals, and not as though each person is an individual with a particular role and a particular identity.

The model also views the idea of identity as, once again, a category, to which people just conform, a social stigma. And, the model assumes that the theory is right and more important than whatever the actual participants might have to say about it. Bucholtz then uses several definitions to explain that each of the speech community limitations is addressed by the community of practice theory, which uses the idea that the social world is best viewed as a set of practices and that we each belong to the community of people who share in our social practices, whatever those may be.

Bucholtz spends the rest of the article applying the community of practice theory to investigate social identity in a group of girl nerds. Negative identity practices are those that individuals use to distance themselves away from the identity that they reject. That is a negative identity practice. Nerds will also want to do well in school, or appear to be intellectual in everyday interaction; this is a positive identity practice. Bucholtz actually analyzes several conversations that a particular club of girl nerds engages in during lunch.

She point out that the conversation begins with an initialization for intellectual display. One of the girls asks some sort of question to which the answer would require some sort of knowledge that not everybody has. The other girls respond by trying to assert their intellectuality by guessing answers. Bucholtz also points out that later on in the conversation, one of the girls uses a slang term, which leads to her eventual exit from the conversation, because the other girls, who appear to be the core members of the group, obviously reject her usage of the slang term by taunting her.

The girl using the can be described as a marginal member, a novice, which Bucholtz also explains, is actually the case in this situation. Bucholtz uses this group of girls because she is trying to show that the speech community would not have been able to garner the analysis that she just made.

She clearly pointed out that each individual was using positive or negative identity practices, to try to create her own identity in the community, not just fit into a particular category. The girls obviously do not have a consensus, and this is shown by the conflicts that Bucholtz points out in the dialogue. There are differences in opinion, and in taste, yet these girls are still a part of the community.

Bucholtz is ultimately showing that identities are rooted in actions rather than categories and that by focusing on individuals as well as on the group, the community of practice model integrates structure, a speech community aspect, with agency, and freewill. Nonetheless, because the concept of speech community is indigenous to sociolinguistics, it is not connected to any larger social theory. This theoretical isolation, along with the fact that the speech community defines the social world in strictly socio linguistic terms, has meant that sociolinguistic theory has largely stood apart from theoretical advances in related disciplines.

More than any previous approach in sociolinguistics, the community of practice allows researchers to examine, in a theoretically adequate way, both the actions of individuals and the structures that are thereby produced and reproduced, resisted and subverted. For sociolinguists, the community of practice represents an improvement over the speech community in that it addresses itself to both the social and the linguistic aspects of the discipline.

As a well-grounded framework with currency in a number of fields, practice theory in general, in particular the community of practice, revitalizes social theory within sociolinguistics.