The topic of this essay will focus on a few of the interesting features of adolescent language and the subsequent attitudes towards them, mainly from the realm of adulthood. Adolescent language appears to experience the most change compared to the language use of either younger children or older speakers, and this is likely due to the idea that around the time of puberty, individuals undergo a large and impactful social change, as their environments, attitudes and stimuli change. As a result, teen language comes to be linked to social change and is used by and individual as a way of projecting themselves in a society and creating a more individual identity for themselves. However, there seem to be a number of attitudes expressed by older speakers,
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Firstly, we will take a broad look at the general consensus adult attitude towards not only adolescents themselves but the greatly negative attitudes directed towards adolescent speech choices and linguistic features commonly linked to adolescent use. As stated by Penelope Eckert (2003), this age group is the predominant leader in much of the linguistic variance that occurs altogether, which commonly include the use of non standard features of language such as slang, alternative quotative lexicon, i.e. ‘be like’ (Tagliamonte and D’Arcy, 2004), and an atypical intonation of syntax, among many other features. The attitudes expressed by adults towards these features is overall fairly negative, and it seems that the treatment of adolescent language is fairly unanimous with the view of adolescents themselves as individuals by adults. Eckert (2003) claims it’s almost as though adults forget the fact that they themselves were once of adolescent age, as their treatment of adolescents is so segregative from the rest of society, yet they treat adolescents and their language as an odd non-human phase one goes through …show more content…
In this study, Bucholtz looks at the non conforming identities created by adolescent girls for themselves within this school as ‘nerds’. Rather than replicate and join in with school-mates in using language features traditionally associated with adolescence, this group of girls appeared to subvert this idea and instead chose to use language forms to emphasise intelligence and school engagement. Bucholtz noted both positive and negative identity practices taking place; with positive practices, i.e. commonly practiced and encouraged language, arriving in the forms of: “Employment of superstandard and hypercorrect phonological forms” (p.226), “Adherence to standard and superstandard syntactic forms”, “Employment of lexical items associated with the formal register (e.g. Greco-Latinate forms)” and “Orientation to language form (e.g. punning, parody, word coinage)”. And on the other side of this are the negative practices, whereby these language forms are not used and often deemed disallowed: “Lesser fronting of (uw) and (ow)"”, “Resistances to colloquial phonological processes such as vowel reduction, consonant-cluster simplification and contraction”, “Avoidance of nonstandard syntactic forms”, and “avoidance of current slang”. What all these practices show us is how the
Firstly, we will take a broad look at the general consensus adult attitude towards not only adolescents themselves but the greatly negative attitudes directed towards adolescent speech choices and linguistic features commonly linked to adolescent use. As stated by Penelope Eckert (2003), this age group is the predominant leader in much of the linguistic variance that occurs altogether, which commonly include the use of non standard features of language such as slang, alternative quotative lexicon, i.e. ‘be like’ (Tagliamonte and D’Arcy, 2004), and an atypical intonation of syntax, among many other features. The attitudes expressed by adults towards these features is overall fairly negative, and it seems that the treatment of adolescent language is fairly unanimous with the view of adolescents themselves as individuals by adults. Eckert (2003) claims it’s almost as though adults forget the fact that they themselves were once of adolescent age, as their treatment of adolescents is so segregative from the rest of society, yet they treat adolescents and their language as an odd non-human phase one goes through …show more content…
In this study, Bucholtz looks at the non conforming identities created by adolescent girls for themselves within this school as ‘nerds’. Rather than replicate and join in with school-mates in using language features traditionally associated with adolescence, this group of girls appeared to subvert this idea and instead chose to use language forms to emphasise intelligence and school engagement. Bucholtz noted both positive and negative identity practices taking place; with positive practices, i.e. commonly practiced and encouraged language, arriving in the forms of: “Employment of superstandard and hypercorrect phonological forms” (p.226), “Adherence to standard and superstandard syntactic forms”, “Employment of lexical items associated with the formal register (e.g. Greco-Latinate forms)” and “Orientation to language form (e.g. punning, parody, word coinage)”. And on the other side of this are the negative practices, whereby these language forms are not used and often deemed disallowed: “Lesser fronting of (uw) and (ow)"”, “Resistances to colloquial phonological processes such as vowel reduction, consonant-cluster simplification and contraction”, “Avoidance of nonstandard syntactic forms”, and “avoidance of current slang”. What all these practices show us is how the