Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
SPEECH COMMUNITY, LANGUAGE COMMUNITY
These terms refer to any constituency whose intragroup relationships and common experiences form their speech into a dialect or subdialect. Such dialects may be regionally or socially distinctive, or both. A large metropolitan city is a speech community in itself, and it contains many smaller speech communities (even down to single families) and in turn is part of a still larger speech community, such as a region or a nation.
