A Sprechbund (; , "

speech Speech is a human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if they are th ...

bond") is a "shared ayof speaking which oesbeyond language boundaries" (Romaine, 1994:23). Thus people speaking different

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

s can share certain linguistic 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 Rapping (also rhyming, spitting, emceeing or MCing) is a musical form of vocal delivery that incorporates "rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular". It is performed or chanted, usually over a backing beat or musical accompaniment. The ...

rhyme A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds (usually, the exact same phonemes) in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of perfect rhyming is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic ...

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 A sprachbund (, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The lan ...

, which refers to "relatedness at the level of linguistic form" (Romaine 1994:23). A sprachbund (Norwegian ') 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 Sociolinguistics''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sociolinguistics German words and phrases {{Sociolinguistics-stub