Publications

Publication details [#50830]

Spreckels, Janet. 2009. Now he thinks he's listening to rock music: Identity construction among German teenage girls. In Stenström, Anna-Brita and Annette Myre Jörgensen, eds. Youngspeak in a Multilingual Perspective. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 184). John Benjamins. pp. 31–53.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins

Annotation

This paper deals with disaffiliation and membership categorization processes among German adolescent girls. Drawing on a peer-group, conceptualized as a ‘community of practice’ (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992), this case study aims to show how the girls’ disaffiliation and categorization of several outgroups serve to negotiate various identity aspects (gender being one of them). The paper investigates the various linguistic resources and communicative strategies the girls apply in their everyday identity negotiations. Further, it discusses which of these resources and strategies can be seen as typical instances of (German) youngspeak. The data is taken from a larger conversation analytic and ethnographic research project on talk-in-interaction among a group of ‘normal’ German high school girls.