Age

Question 1

Gary Ives

Answer 1

Carried out a study where he asked 63 teens in a West Yorkshire secondary school, “do you think people speak differently depending on their age?”
100% replied yes.

Question 2

Penelope Eckert

Answer 2

Different ways of defining the concept of ‘age’:
- Chronological age (number of years since birth)
- Biological age (physical maturity)
- Social age (linked to life events such as marriage and having children)

Question 3

Jenny Cheshire

Answer 3

Argues it is becoming recognised that adult language, as well as child language, develops in response to important life events that affect the social relations and attitudes of individuals.

Question 4

Gary Ives on playground language.

Answer 4

Taboo is part of the teen vernacular
Dialect is used commonly when speaking
Slang, which they see as typical of their age group is common
Informal lexical choices often linked by common themes or topics

Question 5

Anna-Brita Strenström

Answer 5

Discusses a range of features she claims are common in teenage talk.
- Irregular turn-taking
- Overlaps
- Slang
- Taboo
- Language mixing

Question 6

Penelope Eckert on teen talk

Answer 6

Slang is used to establish a connection to youth culture; separate themselves from the older generation.
Typical features:
‘like’ and ‘okay’

Question 7

Ignacio Martínez

Answer 7

Teenagers use negatives more frequently than adults do. Teenagers tend to be much more direct when they speak.

Question 8

Unni Berland

Answer 8

• Studied the use of the tags ‘innit’, ‘yeah’ and ‘okay’.
• Found social class mattered more than age.
• ‘Innit’ used predominantly by w/c, ‘yeah’ by m/c and ‘okay’ was used more by boys than girls.

Question 9

Christopher Odato

Answer 9

Studied the use of ‘like’ as a discourse marker.
Stage 1 - children use ‘like’ infrequently and in ‘only a few syntactic positions’ Mainly at beginning of clause, “Like you won easily”
Stage 2 - children use ‘like’ more often and in ‘a greater number of positions. Girls tended to move to this stage aged 5 and boys aged 7.
Stage 3 - children now use it more frequently in other positions such as a prepositional phrase.

Question 10

Zimmerman

Answer 10

Argues the following factors are influential:
- The media and the press.
- New means of communication.
- Music.
- Street art and graffiti.

Question 10

Vivian de Klerk

Answer 10

Draws several conclusions about language:
- Young people have the freedom to ‘challenge linguistic norms’
- They seek to establish new identities.
- The patterns of speech used by adults are slowly eroded by patterns of peer group.
- They need to be seen as ‘cool’ and ‘up to date’.
- They need to establish themselves as ‘different’.
- Need to belong to a group.

Question 11

Gross

Answer 11

It has been said, although teens understand a wide range of vocabulary they mainly restrict themselves to using 800 words. When at 16, we know 40,000 words.