Can any one explain to me the paragraphs that I marked with '+,**' Lyons offers a definition of what he calls a 'real' speech community: 'all the people who use a given language'. However, that merely shifts the issue to making the definition of a language also the definition of a speech community. It is really quite easy to demonstrate that a speech community is not coterminous with a language: +(While the English langauge is spoken in many places throughout the world, we must certainly recognize that it is also spoken in a wide variety of ways, in speech communities that are almost entirely isolated from one another, for example, in South Africa, in New Zealand, and among various expatriates in China. We must ask ourselves in what sense does this modern lingua franca produce a speech community that might be of interest to us, that is, ask what else is shared other than the very language itself. **Furthermore, if speech communities are defined solely by their linguistic characteristics, we must acknowledge the inherent circularity of any such definition in that langauge itself is a communal possession**. Speakers do use linguistic characteristics to achieve group identity with, and group differention from, other speakers, but they use other characteristics as well: social, cultural, etc. Our search must be for criteria other than, or at least in addition to linguistic criteria if we are to gain a useful understanding of 'speech community '.+) 1)Does it mean that speech community is coterminous with language? If not, why this paragraph that I marked with + means? 2)Also, I can't understand the reason why we can't define speech communities based on their linguistic characteristics. I can't understand the explanation that it gives in the last paragraph.