What is a language community?

Theories of nationalism, democracy, regional assertiveness, and civil war have relied on vague and unspecified,notions of linguistic heterogeneity, based upon estimates of the mother tongues of a population. Under conditions of mother-tongue diversity the criterion for a language community that requires structural proximity of es is equally problematical, and here linguistics gives us little theoretical guidance or empirical data. Another criterion of language diversity measures the probability that two random people in a country will share language. Empirical problems (on getting standards of knowing a language) and theoretical ones; (concerning whether the ability to communicate is sufficient for an indicator of cultural homogeneity) beset measures, In light of these problems, the paper specifies several new measures that might be used for coding a language community. Data collected from six post-Soviet republicans illustrate the potential usefulness of these measures.