Home › Glossary › Letter C

collective speaker

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A poetic persona articulated through multiple or merged voices, presenting a collective rather than individual perspective or identity.

Detailed Definition
A collective speaker is a poetic voice that articulates the thoughts, emotions, or experiences of a group rather than an individual, using “we” or implied plurality to represent communal identity; this perspective foregrounds shared history, cultural memory, or social solidarity over personal introspection.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Langston Hughes’ “I, Too,” the speaker “I” represents the collective Black American experience; In Joy Harjo’s “Remember,” the second-person “you” implicitly includes all listeners in Indigenous cosmology; In Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen,” the shifting “you” constructs a collective subject of racialized experience; In Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the “I” expands to encompass multitudes, creating a democratic collective speaker; In Danez Smith’s “summer, somewhere,” the plural “we” speaks for Black queer youth in afterlife community.
Additional Notes
collective speaker|The narrative voice of the poem is explicitly presented as being a group of people, a community, or a unified body ("we," "us"), rather than a single individual.
Also Known As
communal voice shared speaker chorus narrator Collaborative voice Community voice
Skip to main content