This assignment will focus on the speech community consisting of fans of the “Your Mom’s House” podcast.
In this speech community there is a pattern in morphology of dropped and added morphemes. For example, to exclaim that something is cool or awesome, someone in the group would most likely say amaze! This drops the ‘ing’ from the word amazing. For another example, if someone from this group wanted to say that something is bad they would say way worser. ‘Worser” is clearly not a word, but people in this group use it as an intensifier of the sentiment, which is interestingly why the ‘ing’ in amazing is dropped as well.
There are interesting things going on with the phonetics in this community. Certain phrases are pronounced entirely incorrectly by the entire group. Such as the phrase “you know what I’m saying?” Members of this group would pronounce this ya nam sayin? Similarly, the phrase “get your life” would be pronounced getcho life by all members of the group.
There are strange syntactical things at work within this group, as well. For instance, if someone in this group wanted to know how to say something, they wouldn’t say “how do you say this?” They would say how you say? or how you call? This is incorrect grammar usage for standard English.
Pragmatically, there are lots of things going on that people outside of the group would have no context for understanding. For instance, the word jeans is used rampantly among members of this group. Jeans, for standard English, refers to pants made of denim. In this community jeans refers to just about anything- your spouse, your car, a new song you heard. Jeans can be all of those things for these members.
There are a lot of unique lexical terms within this community, and too many to mention here. Some specific ones are just glassin’, which means to be looking at something, usually in a casual manner. Big Words is a term used to describe racial slurs. Top Dog is a term used to refer to one’s father.
There are many unique speech markers of this group, and use of any of them would immediately identify you as a part of the group to any member.