Definition:

A term used in composition studies and sociolinguistics for a group of people who
share certain language-using practices.

In Grammar and Context, Ann Hewings and Martin Hewings define discourse
communities as "groups of people who share particular registers and use the kinds
of text (both spoken and written) in which these registers occur" (Routledge, 2005).

See also:

Discourse
Audience
Discourse Analysis
Genre
Rhetorical Move
Speech Community
Spoken English
Writing Across the Curriculum
Written English
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Research Analysis
Examples and Observations:

"Use of the term 'discourse community' testifies to the increasingly common

assumption that discourse operates within conventions defined by communities, be
they academic disciplines or social groups. The pedagogies associated with writing
across the curriculum and academic English now use the notion of 'discourse
community' to signify a cluster of ideas: that language use in a group is a form of
social behavior, that discourse is a means of maintaining and extending the group's
knowledge and of initiating new members into the group, and that discourse is
epistemic or constitutive of the group's knowledge."
(Bruce Herzberg, "The Politics of Discourse Communities." CCC Convention, New
Orleans, March 1986)

"I would argue that we must acknowledge conflict as a frequent and perhaps
inevitable concomitant of discourse community interactions, whether we focus on
undergraduate students' entry into the academic discourse community or graduate
students' entry into the subcommunity of our field--which in turn has different
theoretical orientations nested within it . . .."
(Patricia Bizzell, Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness. Univ. of Pittsburgh
Press, 1992)

"A discourse community is a group of people who have texts and practices in
common, whether it is a group of academics or the readers of teenage magazines.
In fact, discourse community can refer to several overlapping groups of people: It
can refer to the people a text is aimed at; it can be the people who read a text; or it
can refer to the people who participate in a set of discourse practices both by
reading and writing."
(David Barton, Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language.
Blackwell, 1994)

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Discourse Communities and Speech Communities
"[John] Swales [in Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings, 1990:
24] develops the idea of 'discourse community' by comparison with 'speech
community.' He mentions several reasons for separating the two concepts: The first
is that a discourse community requires a network of communication and common
goals while there may be considerable distance between the members both
ethnically and geographically. In contrast a speech community requires physical
proximity. A second reason that Swales mentions is that a discourse community is a
socio-rhetorical unit that consists of a group of people who link up in order to pursue
objectives that are established prior to those of socialization and solidarity, both of
which are characteristic of a speech community (i.e. a socio-linguistic unit). A final
point is that discourse communities are centrifugal (they tend to separate people
into occupational or specialty-interest groups), whereas speech communities are
centripetal (they tend to absorb people into the general fabric of society)."
(Pedro Martn-Martn, The Rhetoric of the Abstract in English and Spanish Scientific
Discourse. Peter Lang, 2005)

Changing Conceptions of the Discourse Community

"[T]he notion of the discourse community has rapidly evolved from that of a static
group of experts with clearly defined roles. The discourse community is now
perceived as a diffuse group of individuals with different levels of expertise and
changing social relations, whose communicative needs more or less coincide at
different points in time."
(Jacob Mey, Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics. Elsevier, 1998)

"Our intentionality, our consciousness, comes into existence by being a part of

society, a member of a discourse community. We develop thoughts, feelings, ideas,
beliefs, and attitudes in collaboration with others. Our intentionality is part of the
collective intentionality of the discourse community to which we belong. Our mind is
part of a collective mind."
(Wolfgang Teubert, Meaning, Discourse and Society. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010)