Sprechbund

A Sprechbund (German for "speech bond") refers to "shared ways of speaking which go beyond language boundaries" (Romaine, 1994:23). Thus people speaking different languages can share certain lingiustic characteristics.

This is a particularly useful concept for describing, for example, hip-hop music. Hip-hop has a number of defining characteristics including musical style, clothing, and association with minorities. It also has a number of defining linguistic characteristics like rapping, rhyme and human beatboxing. These are essentially linguistic features, but they can be used in any language - even genetically unrelated languages. Their combined use in different languages allows a kind of universal 'language of hip-hop'.

The Sprechbund is to be contrasted with the Sprachbund, which refers to "relatedness at the level of linguistic form" (Romaine 1994:23). A Sprachbund (Norwegian Språkknippe) is a group of languages that have become structurally similar in some way because of geographical proximity. As the names suggest, Sprechbund is about speech, and how language is produced; Sprachbund is about the underlying structure of language.

References

* Romaine, Suzanne. 1994. "Language in society: An introduction to socioliguistics". Oxford: Oxford University Press.