> Yet clearly people do join communities. "Communities" here also have a hierarchy: 1. All speakers of a language 2. Speakers in a region (dialect) 3. Subgro

> Yet clearly people do join communities. "Communities" here also have a hierarchy: 1. All speakers of a language 2. Speakers in a region (dialect) 3. Subgroups like teenagers, engineers, gamers, redditors 4. Sub-sub groups like teenagers from a specific school, engineers of a specific discipline, gamers of a certain game x. Personal dialect (idiolect), which is a sub group that exists separately to all of these and is most closely related to family and the friend group you had as a child and teenager. We are all members of many different groups which intermesh, and we seemlessly switch meaning and pronunciation as we do that (code switching). When joining a community, people start at the top (learn French) then move through subgroups. Dictionaries and textbooks are designed to match as closely as possible to the top level community's consensus of word meaning, which, being large, is also the most static. But any language learner will know that textbooks can only get you so far in learning how language is actually spoken day to day. You have to join the community to learn that. The same applies as you go down to dialects and other sub groups. You can learn a bit before you join, but becoming a part of the community, linguistically, can only happen after joining.