Irrespective of when nations are formed, their emergence as a speech community and their establishment and enforcement of a national language occur as acts of sacrifice, loss and gain. This chapter considers the question of what frames and characterizes speech communities that come together as the result of domination, mutual endeavor, personal ties and collective identities. The importance of this analysis is at the heart of Toni Morrison's 1993 Lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature (published the following year). While all social actors belong to speech communities, every interaction is not based on membership in one community or another. Speech communities are not organized around linguistic facts but around people who want to share their opinions, identities, thoughts and solidarities, and generally communicate with their evolving social world. Although many people operate within multiple speech communities, they do so in order to participate in the “mutual exchange of words and ideas” and to represent their identity(ies) as full social actors. Speech communities may develop as the result of force and political contact where language ideology is promoted and imposed by those in power.