Discourse communities are groups of people that share common goals and values, they often practice the same things and communicate similar topics. As a college student myself, I am a part of many discourse communities, considering it’s defined as maintaining and extending the group knowledge through discussion. Whether it’s an academic setting or a professional environment, discourse communities shape how people engage with one another and navigate their shared interests.
Speech discourse is a community of people sharing functional rules that determine their shared linguistic forms and cultural concepts. Speech community is seen as being composed of those who share similar linguistic rules. The example Swales uses is New York City is a single speech community and not a collection of speakers living side-by-side borrowing occasionally from other dialects. The people living in New York share a common culture outside of speech, such as social behavior. I have visited New York and seen firsthand the difference in attitudes and culture in New York, rather than New Jersey. When you visit New York as a foreigner, you may be able to feel as if you were a complete outsider compared to the people who live there.
Yet there is still one remaining problem with discourse communities and that’s whether our community’s discourse and its discourse expectations are constitutive or regulative of worldview. Each language possesses a culture and a structure that influences the way that people live, which makes recruiting members harder than expected. What qualifies a person to be able to join a community discourse? Joining a discourse community typically involves several qualifications and characteristics that affect the communication of the group, usually a shared goal or interest or communication skills are necessary to engage in discourse communities.
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