A Sprechbund (; , "

speech Speech is the use of the human voice as a medium for language. Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning like words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts, suc ...

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 that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

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, flowing, spitting, emceeing, or MCing) is an artistic form of vocal delivery and emotive expression that incorporates " rhyme, rhythmic speech, and ommonlystreet vernacular". It is usually performed over a backin ...

rhyme A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds (usually the exact same phonemes) in the final Stress (linguistics), stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of rhyming (''perfect rhyming'') is consciou ...

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 (, from , '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. Th ...

, 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