Opinion Article – Should teen language be celebrated as being representative of the diversity of our language or judged to be restrictive and inferior?

 

Teenagers are often portrayed as lazy, moody and an article in the Daily Mail says that teenagers only use 800 words compared to adults who use 20,000+. As a teenager myself, I am here to tell you why I strongly disagree with this accusation.

I’m constantly surrounded by people my age and have to interact with them on daily basis so of course my language is going to be shaped by them.  However, every individual teenager has their differences in how they communicate. For example, a life event such as grieving from a death will cause a teenager to mature much quicker than they would have before. Theorist Penelope Eckert (1998) believes that any life event that affects social relations and attitudes help to develop a teenagers language. Jenny Cheshire (1987) adds to this theory by saying life events also affect adults and everyone has their own individual vocabulary and maturity.  Not all people in the same age group will be at a similar stage in life, for example, a 16 year old who has a child will have to mature much faster than a 16 year old who is in college.

Words are often generated within the teenager lexicon with words such as ‘like’ being used as a discourse marker in everyday sentences. For example, ‘You landed like, right on target’. I’m sure many adults have used the discourse marker ‘um’ every now and again, so what is so wrong with the discourse marker ‘like’? Christopher Odato (2013) discovered that ‘like’ in children’s speech was used in 3 stages. It was used at the start of sentences to establish that they were going to begin talking by children, in girls aged 5 and boys aged 7 it was used more often and moved around the sentence and then increased in usage especially before a prepositional phrase. He also found that that this changed happened in girls before boys. I believe there is no harm in using the discourse marker ‘like’ as a way of stuttering before and during a sentence and that it is no different from using the word ‘um’.

Every generation wants to seem like a revolutionary and different group of people so what teenagers today are doing is no different from what your generation have done or the one before you or the one before them. Vivian de Klerk (2005) believes that young people can ‘challenge linguistic norms’ and need to be seen as ‘modern, cool fashionable and up-to-date’.  They want to establish themselves as ‘different’ and teenagers want to become a ‘distinctive social group’ and do you blame them? Wouldn’t it be boring if every social group had the same lexicon and linguistic features?  Social groups require differences in order to be a classed as a separated group and so there is no surprise that teens divert away from adult language and create their own.