‘Speech community’ has been a troubled term, caught in a number of methodological, epistemic and political cross-currents, and this paper will try to trace some of its most important shifts in meaning since the 1960s. Some of this movement has occurred within the arena of sociolinguistics itself. The meaning of an analytic concept is always likely to be influenced by the particular methodological preferences of the scholars who use it, and in the course of the paper, a number of different schools and sub-paradigms will be addressed, pointing to some substantial differences in the inflections that they give to the concept. But at the same time, sociolinguistics has always been more than just a technical activity, and ‘speech community’ has been especially hard to tie down as a analytic term isolated from the much larger debates that affect our understanding of community as a concept in everyday language and in social science more generally. Within this larger field, a number of shifts have recently become salient. Rather than our actions being seen as a mere reflection of our belonging to ‘big’ communities that pre-exist us, there is now more emphasis on the part that here-and-now social action plays in the production of ‘small’ but new communities, and rather than just concentrating on behaviour at the core, there is a burst of interest in interaction with ‘strangers’ inside, outside and at the boundaries. Comparably, scholarship itself doesn’t simply report on communities — it also helps to create them, destroy and prevent their inception. To give a clearer idea of these more general changes in perspective and focus, the paper will try to embed the discussion of sub-disciplinary schools and themes in a larger epistemic frame. More specifically, it will suggest that during the 1960s and 70s (and often much later), treatments of ‘speech community’ were dominated by a preoccupation with the encounter between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, while we can make better sense of more recent developments if we refer to the discourses of late/post-modernity. From the start of sociolinguistic discussion of speech community, the aim has been to show that social organisation and language use are profoundly interwoven, and so when our sense of speech community alters, there are often consequences for the kinds of language practice that we attend to. In line with this, the paper also tries to describe important changes in linguistic focus, covering shifts of interest running, for example, from competence to reflexivity, from practice and representation to artful performance, and from regularity to spectacle. This paper is divided into the following sections: (1) Community speech and speech community: Pragmatic vs. distributional perspectives; (2) Speech community at the interface of ‘tradition and modernity’; (3) Late modern discourse, language and community; (4) Communities of practice; (5) Community as a semiotic sign; (6) Language ideologies and the production of community; (7) From the ‘linguistics of community’ to a ‘linguistics of contact’; (8) Community and discourse in the Information Age; (9) Conclusion.