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Communities of Practice
P Eckert, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA consensual or conflictual, it is based in a commitment
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. to mutual engagement, and to mutual understanding of
that engagement. Participants in a community of prac-
tice collaborate in placing themselves as a group with
The notion ‘community of practice’ was developed respect to the world around them. This includes the
by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (Lave and Wenger, common interpretation of other communities, and of
1991; Wenger, 2000) as the basis of a social theory of their own practice with respect to those communities,
learning. A community of practice is a collection and ultimately the development of a style – including a
of people who engage on an ongoing basis in some linguistic style – that embodies these interpretations.
common endeavor: a bowling team, a book club, a Time, meanwhile, allows for greater consistency in this
friendship group, a crack house, a nuclear family, endeavor – for more occasions for the repetition of
a church congregation. The construct was brought circumstances, situations, and events. It provides
into sociolinguistics (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, opportunities for joint sense making, and it deepens
1992a, 1992b) as a way of theorizing language and participants’ shared knowledge and sense of pre-
gender – most particularly, of responsibly connecting dictability. This not only allows meaning to be exer-
broad categories to on-the-ground social and linguistic cised, but it provides the conditions for setting down
practice. convention (Lewis, 1969).
The value of the notion to sociolinguistics and lin- The community of practice offers a different
guistic anthropology lies in the fact that it identifies a perspective from the traditional focus on the speech
social grouping not in virtue of shared abstract char- community as an explanatory context for linguistic
acteristics (e.g., class, gender) or simple copresence heterogeneity. The speech community perspective
(e.g., neighborhood, workplace), but in virtue of shared views heterogeneity as based in a geographically
practice. In the course of regular joint activity, a com- defined population, and structured by broad and
munity of practice develops ways of doing things, fundamental social categories, particularly class,
views, values, power relations, ways of talking. And gender, age, race, and ethnicity. The early survey
the participants engage with these practices in virtue of studies in this tradition (Labov, 1966; Wolfram,
their place in the community of practice, and of the 1969; Trudgill, 1974; Macaulay, 1977) provided the
place of the community of practice in the larger social backbone of variation studies, mapping broad distri-
order. The community of practice is thus a rich locus for butions across large urban communities. What these
the study of situated language use, of language change, studies could not provide is the link between broad,
and of the very process of conventionalization that abstract patterns and the meanings that speakers are
underlies both. constructing in the concrete situated speech that
Two conditions of a community of practice are underlies them. The search for local explanations of
crucial in the conventionalization of meaning: shared linguistic variability has spurred a range of ethno-
experience over time and a commitment to shared graphic studies over the years (Labov, 1963; Gal,
understanding. A community of practice engages peo- 1979; Eckert, 2000), and in recent decades the ethno-
ple in mutual sense making – about the enterprise they graphic trend has intensified. A major challenge in
are engaged in, about their respective forms of partici- such studies is to find local settings in which speakers
pation in the enterprise, about their orientation to other engage the most intensely in making sense of their
communities of practice and to the world around them place in the wider social world, and in which they
more generally. Whether this mutual sense making is articulate their linguistic behavior with this sense.
684 Communities of Practice

The construct ‘community of practice’ is a way of communities of practice, rather than with parents’
locating language use ethnographically so as to create social class. The jocks’ and burnouts’ contrasting
an accountable link between local practice and mem- orientation to such things as school, the urban area,
bership in extralocal and broad categories. What relationships, and the future provided direct explana-
makes a community of practice different from tions for the burnouts’ lead in the adoption of new
just any group of speakers (e.g., a bunch of kids local changes.
found hanging out on the street, or a group of under- Another important aspect of the communities of
graduates assembled for an experiment) is not practice approach is its focus on the fluidity of social
the selection of the speakers so much as the nature space and the diversity of experience. The speech
of the accountability for this selection. While every community perspective’s focus on demographic cate-
community of practice offers a window on the world, gories implies a center and a periphery (Rampton,
the value of this approach relies on the analyst’s abili- 1999). The focus on average behavior for categories
ty to seek out communities of practice that are partic- suggests a ‘typical’ speaker, erasing the important
ularly salient to the sociolinguistic question being activity of speakers at the borders of categories. This
addressed. It is this selection that makes the differ- also produces a static view of the relation between the
ence between particularism and a close-up study with linguistic and the social, since change tends to come
far-reaching significance. from the borders (Pratt, 1988). Studies of commu-
Explanation for broad patterns is to be found in nities of practice, therefore, can capture the interac-
speakers’ experience, understanding, and linguistic tion between social and linguistic change. Qing
development as they engage in life as members of Zhang, for example (Zhang, 2001), has captured
important overarching categories. A white working- the role of stylistic practice among the new Beijing
class Italian-American woman does not develop her ‘yuppies’ in the development of new dialect features,
ways of speaking directly from the larger categories and Andrew Wong (Wong, 2005) has traced semantic
‘working class,’ ‘Italian-American’ and ‘female,’ but change in the differential use of the term tongzhi
from her day-to-day experience as a person who com- ‘comrade’ between the activist and nonactivist
bines those three (and other) memberships. Her experi- gay communities. Mary Bucholtz’s study (Bucholtz,
ence will be articulated by her participation in activities 1996) of a group of girls who were fashioning
and communities of practice that are particular to her themselves as geeks – a persona normally reserved
place in the social order. It is in these communities of for males – provided direct observation of girls push-
practice that she will develop an identity and the ing the envelope of gender in their daily linguistic
linguistic practices to articulate this identity. Thus practice.
communities of practice are fundamental loci for the A community of practice that is central to many of
experience of membership in broader social categories its participants’ identity construction is an important
– one might say that it is the grounded locus of the locus for the setting down of joint history, allowing
habitus (Bourdieu, 1977). for the complex construction of linguistic styles. Such
Survey studies show us that working-class speakers history also sets the stage for change. Emma Moore’s
lead in the adoption of local phonological change. study of teenage girls in northern England (Moore,
While one can speculate about the motivations for 2003) traced the gradual split of a group of somewhat
this early adoption on the basis of general knowledge rebellious ‘populars’ as some of them emerged as the
about class, the actual dynamics of social meaning tougher ‘townies’ in their ninth year. In the process,
can only be found through direct examination of the vernacular speech patterns of the townies intensi-
working-class linguistic practice. Ethnographic work fied in opposition to those of their more conservative
in suburban Detroit high schools (Eckert, 2000) friends.
sought to understand the salience of class in adoles- The enterprise of sociolinguistics (and linguistic
cents’ day-to-day practice. The study uncovered an anthropology) is to relate ways of speaking to ways
opposition between two large communities of of participating in the social world. This is not simply
practice, the jocks and the burnouts, that constitute a question of discovering how linguistic form corre-
class cultures in the context of the high school. lates with social structure or activity, but of how
The working-class culture of the burnouts and the social meaning comes to be embedded in language.
middle-class culture of the jocks are specifically ado- Meaning is made in the course of local social practice
lescent, and class consciousness and conflict takes the (McConnell-Ginet, 1989) and conventionalized on
form of a highlighted social opposition in school and the basis of shared experience and understanding
the maximization of resources in constructing this (Lewis, 1969). The importance of the community of
opposition. Linguistic variables, a prime resource, practice lies in the recognition that identity is not
correlated significantly with participation in these fixed, that convention does not pre-exist use, and
 Comoros: Language Situation 685

that language use is a continual process of learning. Gal S (1979). Language shift: social determinants of
The community of practice is a prime locus of this linguistic change in bilingual Austria. New York:
process of identity and linguistic construction. Academic Press.
Communities of practice emerge in response to Labov W (1963). ‘The social motivation of a sound
change.’ Word 18, 1–42.
common interest or position, and play an important
Labov W (1966). The social stratification of English in
role in forming their members’ participation in, and
New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied
orientation to, the world around them. It should Linguistics.
be clear that the speech community and the commu- Lave J & Wenger E (1991). Situated learning: legiti-
nity of practice approaches are both necessary and mate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge
complementary, and that the value of each depends University Press.
on having the right abstract categories and finding Lewis D (1969). Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
the communities of practice in which those categories University Press.
are most salient. In other words, the best analytic Macaulay R K S (1977). Language, social class and educa-
process would involve feedback between the two tion: a Glasgow study. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
approaches. Press.
McConnell-Ginet S (1989). ‘The sexual (re)production of
meaning: a discourse-based theory.’ In Frank F W &
See also: Gender; Identity and Language; Interactional Treichler P A (eds.) Language, gender and professional
Sociolinguistics; Sociolinguistic Crossing. writing: theoretical approaches and guidelines for
nonsexist usage. New York: MLA. 35–50.
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Comoros: Language Situation

W Full, University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany the 8th or 9th century (Nurse and Hinnebusch,
ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1993). Over the next 1000 years the Comoros were
part of a great trading network in the Indian Ocean
dominated by Arab merchants. In the 19th century
The Comoros consist of four main islands situated France gradually increased its influence on the islands
halfway between the East African coast and the and finally declared them a French colony in 1912.
northern tip of Madagascar. Linguistic and archaeo- Political demand for independence arose later than
logical evidence show that the ancestors of today’s in most African countries, but in 1975 the three islands
Comorians arrived here from East Africa, probably in of Grande Comore (Ngazija/Shingazija), Anjouan