Discourse constructions of youth identities is an eclectic collection of 12 papers which examine the language of youth in England, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan. The authors use various methodologies, including narrative analysis, conversational analysis, sociolinguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis, to look at the language practices of youth ranging in age from nine years to the early twenties. In addition to studies of spontaneous peer group interaction in schools and youth centers, the volume also includes work on various kinds of expressive culture, focus group interactions, and interviews.

One of the strongest chapters is Peter Auer & İnci Dirmi's piece on the spontaneous acquisition of Turkish by non-Turkish adolescents in Germany. Auer & Dirmi illustrate the complex reasons why adolescents and young adults they surveyed in Hamburg learned to speak Turkish from their peers. They note that these youths, who come from a wide range of language backgrounds, display various kinds of orientations to speaking Turkish. These include speaking it for instrumental purposes to gain access to youth groups and speaking the language among themselves even when no native speakers of Turkish are present, as a kind of orientation to a plurilingual adolescent speech style. Drawing from a rich ethnographic background, Auer & Dirmi locate their subjects on three axes: (i) positive or negative construction of “the Turks”; (ii) orientation to German mainstream vs. subcultural street culture; and (iii) negative or positive orientation to youth culture. In its careful attention to the various meanings that speaking Turkish indexes, Auer & Dirmi's piece demonstrates that facile generalizations about the subversive and countercultural nature of youth language practices do not always hold true.

A number of the other articles in this collection also examine youth in multilingual contexts, including Werner Kallmeyer & Inken Keim's paper on German-Turkish codeswitching and the use of a local German dialect they call “district talk” by a group of adolescent girls of mixed backgrounds, and Vasiliki Lytra's on teasing and nicknames among Greek/Turkish bilingual fourth-graders. While Kallmeyer & Keim highlight the role of codeswitching and district talk in exacerbating disagreement, Lytra looks at how teasing varies depending on its affective key as playful or hurtful and according to the gender of the participants.

Kuniyoshi Kataoka's chapter discusses innovative work on affect and writing. Drawing on a corpus of personal letters written by young women in Japan, Kataoka examines the use of “deformed” letters, unconventional punctuation, and pictorial signs to convey affect. By showing how the same letter writer alters the visual presentation of her writing depending on how close she is to her correspondent, and how punctuation/signs relate to other kinds of interpersonal affect markers like ne and yo, Kataoka provides a fascinating examination of the creative use of multimodal semiotic resources by youth in Japan.

Although the collection is in part predicated on the assumption that “youth” forms some kind of distinct social category, Tore Kristiansen's essay on the social evaluation of different Danish dialects is one of the few here that consider how youths are differentiated from others. Using variationist methodology, Kristiansen examines how adolescents, teachers, and managers overtly evaluate different dialects of Danish, and then covertly evaluate speakers of those dialects on “competence” and “sociability” scales. In both cases, youths show patterns of evaluation that are distinct from those of their older counterparts.

Although some chapters make links to broader theoretical issues in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, others do not seem so well grounded in contemporary research, especially outside of Europe. In addition, several articles could have benefited from more rigorous copyediting.

In the end, the wide-ranging nature of the chapters in this volume reveal both the strengths and the limitations of considering youth as a category. It is made abundantly clear that youths are never merely youths but are also girls, immigrants, music lovers, students, younger siblings, urban dwellers, and so on, yet one is left wondering what the relevance of youth as a category might be. For example, although several authors touch on the “playful” quality of youth language, or its innovativeness and embrace of the vernacular, it is at times difficult to discern a coherent thread that links their contributions. As I was reading the collection, I found myself wondering what an examination of discourse markers in Swedish adolescent casual conversation was doing in the same volume as a critical discourse analysis of tradition and late modernity in narratives about the shooting of a Greek Cypriot. At a time when studies of discourse seem increasingly fractured in terms of methodology, Androutsopoulos & Georgakopoulou's volume presents a broadly inclusive portrait of contemporary research on the language of youth.