In this edited collection, the authors seek to examine the linguistic practices of young people. The editors group the papers according to three themes: how language is used to construct youth identities, research on specific words and phrases common in youth language, and comparisons between youth from different parts of the world. As a whole, this collection suggests further avenues of research through its conceptualization of the speech of young people as a global phenomenon that has wider social and cultural effects.
In their introduction, Stenström and Jørgensen claim young people to be unique in their language practices and advocate for developing more corpora of their speech. Using the term youngspeak, rather than youthspeak, they attempt to include pre-adolescents as well as teenagers as objects of study. Ultimately, their goal is “to reveal tendencies that the adolescent vernaculars in different countries have in common,” by looking at how the features examined play a role in youth identity construction (4). The chapters in the first section analyze how young people use language to mediate their various identities. Argiris Archakis & Dimitris Papazachariou show how Greek teenage girls use direct speech quotations to symbolize autonomy and group solidarity. In her study of German teenage girls, Janet Spreckels shows how identities can be created and negotiated through positioning oneself against others, as these girls do by talking about others’ “inauthentic” musical preferences. Finally, Vally Lytra & Taşkın Baraç examine how Turkish-speaking native Londoners use both languages for presenting identities as language learners, as bilinguals, and as urbanites whose lives extend beyond their diasporic community.
Much of the research in sections two and three relies on naturally-occurring speech found in youth language corpora, namely the Spanish COLAm (Corpus de lenguaje adolescente de Madrid) and the English COLT (The Bergen corpus of London teenage language). In the second section, Juan A. Martínez López looks at how youth in Madrid use fixed phrases to intensify their statements. Also using the COLAm corpus, Annette Myre Jørgensen reveals that upper-class girls are much more likely to use the expression en plan as a hedge in their speech. The final papers attempt to compare aspects of youngspeak across cultures. This section begins with Klaus Zimmermann's paper outlining a model for researching youth speech across Spanish-speaking countries, showing how youth language is both locally created yet “part of a global sociocultural process” (121). Looking at both the COLAm and COLT corpora, Anna-Brita Stenström compares the uses of pues nada and anyway, showing how they can function in similar ways as discourse markers and that “they tend to reflect speaker intentions and interpersonal meanings” (143). Eli-Marie Drange compares the use of anglicisms among boys in Norwegian and Chilean corpora, finding that both groups use anglicisms when discussing technology and for expressive purposes within interpersonal interactions. Lastly, the use of slang and taboo words by teenagers in Lithuania and England is the focus of Jolanta Legaudaite's paper. Applying the Psycho-Social Theory, Legaudaite shows how Lithuanian teenagers use slang more than English teenagers, and boys more than girls due to influences of the family, peer network values, and cultural socialization.
