Types of speech culture


As a rule, a good speech is a sign that its author belongs to the elite type of speech culture. On the other hand, representatives of this type of speech culture are able to create good texts. In the sphere of the literary language there are two established (elitist and middle literary) and two emerging types of speech culture (literary-colloquial and familiar-colloquial, usually intersecting with the slang, which is already outside the scope of the literary language).

Elite-type media are people who have all the norms of the literary language, respecting ethical and communicative norms, that is, they build their speech with the account of functional-style differentiation of the literary language, features of oral and written speech, speech etiquette. The elitist type of speech culture embodies the general high level of human culture. An important feature of representatives of this type is the lack of self-confidence in their knowledge and the habit of constantly replenishing

them, based on their verification on authoritative texts, dictionaries and reference books.

The average literary type includes the majority of the educated population of Russia – people with higher education and a significant number of people with an average. The medium-literary type is not fully mastered by the elite, that is why it respects the norms of the literary language, but in the absence of necessary knowledge this leads to distorted ideas about the correctness, abuse of books and foreign words, violation of traditional national communicative and ethical norms.

At the same time, often representatives of the medium-literary type of speech culture occupy the position of linguistic nihilists: they not only do not bother mistakes in their own speech and there is no habit of seeking information from authoritative sources (dictionaries and reference books), but quite often they quite aggressively defend precisely the wrong version of usage, writing, pronunciation and fairly free attitude to the rules.

Literary-colloquial and familiar-colloquial types began to take shape as independent only in

the 90s of the 20th century. If for the medium of medium-literary type of speech culture, unlike carriers of an elitist type, possession is by far not all functional varieties of the literary language (as a rule, it is colloquial speech and one of the functional styles required professionally: for scientists – scientific, for journalists – journalistic and etc.), then carriers of “conversational” types are characterized by the possession of only a colloquial communication system, which is used by them in any situation, including official. As a consequence, speech of representatives of this type of speech culture is always reduced, which brings it closer to vernacular, which is outside the literary language.


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Types of speech culture