It is not generally helpful to add a term to one’s field unless it is intended to
serve some demonstrably useful purpose. The term “Community of Practice”
bears a strong similarity to the existing term “speech community” – a concept that
has proved to be a productive and useful tool for research into the orderly heterogeneity of language in its social setting; thus it must be shown how the CofP
in some way takes us farther toward our goal of understanding the constraints on
natural language variation.