Discourse+Community

The discourse community in which I will discuss is that of my family. This includes both my parents and my two younger sisters. We live in a small suburb just outside of town. Both my parents work and all of us kids are in school. I have a sister in 1st grade and a sister that’s a junior in high school. I would consider my family to be fairly middle class and the language that we use fits right in with those standards.

The only language that is spoken in our household is English. Due to the large age gap between my youngest sister and I there are a wide variety of conversations that we share. This is because we talk about stories that my youngest sister has about all her friends and school and then we have the experiences that I go through while being away at college. My other sister loves to talk about all the drama that goes on in high school, which sometimes brings up very sticky conversations that none of us really want to have. Most of what my family talks about is what’s going on in our school lives. This means that we talk about friends we make or how classes are going or any activities that we are involved in. Both my parents love to hear about all the things that we do in school. We also talk about current events that we see or hear on the news. Politics is one thing that my family doesn’t ever really talk about. We don’t care too much for politicians although we do occasionally discuss any elections that might be coming up. My family doesn’t have a problem with speaking their opinions because even if they aren’t the same as someone else’s they are still respected. Sometimes when there is a disagreement in opinions we will have a little debate trying to persuade the other in a different direction. Nobody really takes this personally however so they never worry about somebody disagreeing with their opinion.

At home we consider profanity as curse words or any racist comments. We pretty much never use curse words even if something bad or surprising were to happen. If one of us kids were to accidently say a curse word, then my parents would just comment on the fact that we need to watch our mouths. My family does however use a lot of sarcasm. We will use sarcasm in just about every type of conversation whether it is to lighten the atmosphere or when just messing around with some friends. Along with sarcasm, slang is used quite often when the conversation is pretty light. We don’t use it all the time, but when it is appropriate it will probably be used.

When my family is having a serious conversation interruption is not tolerated. I know that when one of us kids interrupts the other there is some arguing that will definitely occur. When we are just talking casually then interruption is fine as long as we aren’t being rude about it. During a serious conversation we know it is okay to speak when the previous speaker has stopped or has asked for opinions. When chatting back and forth we just say what we want to say when there is a pause in the conversation or when the speaker has finished their thought.

I consider my families language to be middle class because of the things that we talk about or don’t talk about. For instance, profanity usually isn’t used in upper and middle class families whereas it is more likely to be used in lower class or urban families. We focus a lot of our conversations on all aspects of school and our futures. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we have an academic language, but we tend to have well thought out opinions and thoughts on many different matters. We don’t use so much slang that we could be considered folksy or rural, but we do use a little bit. We usually keep the conversation pretty light and relaxed.