Youth language
Table of contents
The relation between youth and language has been a central focus point within sociolinguistics since the origin of the field (Labov 1966, 1972b). The notions of “youth language”, “youth languages”, “youth’s languages”, etc. have lent themselves to book titles, handbook chapters, and conference series. From this point of departure, a number of areas within sociolinguistics have been addressed. Typical themes can be exemplified through the areas included in the international conference on Youth Language/Jugendsprache: (1) youth languages in urban centres, (2) youth languages and dialect, (3) youth languages and empiricism (methods), (4) perception of age-related language variation, (5) youth languages and the media, and (6) social constructions of youth (Nortier 2018). On the one hand, this provides a good overview of the recent strands of research carried out in sociolinguistics under the umbrella term of youth language(s). On the other hand, as we will argue in this chapter, another more meta-scientific area could potentially be added: namely an analysis of the ideological acts carried out by sociolinguists when applying the notion of “youth language” and putting it to work. In connection to this, the idea of adolescents and youth language(s) play different roles in different research orientations. As an example, adolescents are seen as “inauthentic” in studies of dialect use (see below), as “movers and shakers” (Eckert 2000) in studies of language change, and as authentic and creative languagers in studies of languaging in urban multilingual environments and digitally mediated communication (Jørgensen et al. 2011). Since youth occupies quite different ideological positions within the different types of studies it is worthwhile to compare the arguments leading to these positions and discuss how they may enlighten one another to gain a more nuanced understanding of use of the notion of youth language(s) in contemporary sociolinguistics. This is the aim of our chapter.
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