This chapter is concerned with identity and ideological positions that develop within speech communities. It explores the concept of language ideology in terms of dominance, resistance, representation, power and control. It is concerned with language loyalty, identity, and how these are ratified across different formations of speech communities. More directly, this chapter focuses on the role of the speech community in the critique of power relationships and interactions where bigotry and injustice are suspected. It will explore the relationship between power and powerful speech through reviews and critiques of theories of language, culture, and identity as they relate to ethnicity, race, gender, and nationalism.

The Global Speech Community

While it is true that one can be a member of multiple speech communities, it is also true that the extent of participation may vary depending on what one knows and understands about the norms that might shape the discursive practices unique to each community. The task is to grasp the intertextuality between and within speech communities in order to unpack the knowledge that makes a speech community member competent. This challenge is illustrated in the words and images of Le Bien, Le Mal – The Good, The Bad, a hiphop song by the late US hiphop artist Guru and the French hiphop artist MC Solaar. In Morgan (2001) the global reach of what is often called “The Hiphop Nation” is explored through the song's linguistic, musical and spatial merging of Paris and New York/Brooklyn. The prelude to the Guru-Solaar music video collaboration Le Bien, Le Mal includes a mobile phone call from MC Solaar – in Paris and speaking French to Guru – in Brooklyn and speaking English. They are not simply speaking French and English but rather MC Solaar's French includes verlan – urban French vernacular that incorporates movement of syllables and deletion of consonants. Guru's English is laced with Hiphop terminology and African American English (AAE) as he talks to MC Solaar. Yet in spite of these obvious differences they communicate ‘perfectly’ and arrange to meet in a Paris/New York space that can only be Hiphop.