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Whether the features of AA discourse outlined here are universal throughout AA remains a subject for further research. However, there is little evidence at present that the meeting discourse in Hispanic AA—the fastest growing AA outside the United States—or elsewhere is any different from that presented here. Arminen’s (1996a, 1996b, 1998a, 1998b) description of AA discourse in Norway indicates that the sharing there is essentially the same as that in English-speaking countries.
AA meetings conducted in English in a modern Chinese city attract visitors from the United States, Australia, and Great Britain, as well as members from both other English-speaking and non-English-speaking countries. Virtually all of the visitors testify to feeling ‘thoroughly at home’, and the local members who speak English as a second language have no difficulty in readily adopting the prevailing manner of sharing that they find the foreigners in their country using.
This sense of belonging to a uniform and far-flung discourse community certainly owes much to the existence of a core of AA literature, particularly the central AA texts: Alcoholic Anonymous (1939), known as the Big Book, and the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (1952b), also known as the Twelve by Twelve. Nonetheless, the apparently spontaneous spread and regeneration of the discursive practices over 70 years across a number of cultures and language groups does suggest a widespread uniformity of need. Perhaps this in itself suggests the existence of at least a group of individuals, if not a personality type—who share both a common compulsion to drink too much and a common dysfunctional way of orientating to the world—who seem to find a way of acquiring a new orientation to life through engaging in a particular type of talk and following the 12-step programme.
This is not a claim that AA meeting formats across the world are similar. They obviously are not (Mäkelä et al., 1996). What is at discussion here is the nature of AA sharing. AA meetings are uniform in neither the ordering of various episodes nor the way turns are allocated and even in what prayers are said. Some of these variations are discussed in chapter 7. However within the sharing turns, AA discourse remains remarkably similar in the way personal stories are told and the way speakers align themselves to each other and AA as a whole. Furthermore, this degree of uniformity is maintained despite the absence of central direction or regulations.