Opinion Article on Teenspeak

The colossal world of Teenspeak: is it like advantageous or insignificant?

In society, there are several different attitudes to the way teenagers decide to communicate. Some say that their language helps to shape your identity as you develop therefore it should be celebrated, such as linguist Vera Regan who concluded that language reflected and performed individuals' profiles as its a way for someone to express their identity. Whereas others hold the view that the informal, non-standard variants of English they often use and the slang they express should be questioned for the unprofessionalism it creates, therefore is judged for being restrictive and inferior. This being said, the biggest critics seem to be the teachers of the teenspeak on teenagers today; parents and teachers. So is it fair to make such an immediate verdict and label us as 'uneducated' when in reality, nothing can be changed? I think not. It is clear to me that the teenage language is much more wise than some may think and the fact that it get's disenchanted is unnecessary. Let me explain why...

For centuries, slang has been seen in a negative light as it has been justified by many as 'lazy language' used by teenagers and in general it is just too hard to understand. Why should this matter though? As recent research suggests, Eckert (2003) for example reinforces the idea that "slang is used to 'establish a connection to youth culture and to set themselves off from the older generation.. to signal coolness, toughness or attitude." and to an extent I agree. If speaking differently to how others have in different generations make teenagers feel better about themselves then I don't see why their language should be championed. This leads me on to support another current linguist, Vivian de Klerk (2005) who draws to the conclusion that teenagers feel the need to diverge to establish themselves as different from 'their parents, other adults and other young people' meanwhile distinguish themselves as a distinctive social group. She argues that young people have the freedom to 'challenge linguistic norms' so this is the strategy they should take to do so.

Additionally, slang should not be blamed for fabricating diversity in society or giving modern language a bad reputation because words we commonly use now have been used for as long as language has existed and some are yet to realise this. For example, children use the word 'like' but this same preposition has been used for years on end, by people of all ages, just in a different way. So isn't it a bit hypocritical that teenagers should have their speech criticised despite the fact it's stemmed from previous generations? Let's think about this. Yes. We all know you all love to stereotype all us teens into one unsocialble group and boast about how we're all the same, that our textspeak is becoming a part of our everyday, face to face communication if that's even an occurance anymore etc, etc, blah, blah, blah. But surprisingly, linguistic change is far more common in teenagers than anyone else, especially in the coining of new lexical terms for example. Shock? Well, instead of being so quick to judge and tarring us all under the same brush, it needs to be taken into consideration that, as Penelope Eckert establishes, we can't state that all people in an age group will share the same linguistic characteristics because as I previously expressed, no teenager is the same! Instead, we need to consider that 'age is a person's place at any given time in relation to the social order: a stage, a condition, a place in history'. It's agreeable, textspeak has had a huge influence on teenspeak in the past few years, positively and negatively, and as John McWhorter mentioned in his 2013 TED talk; 'Texting is killing language' that texting is now called 'fingered speech', meaning we're starting to text the way we talk. Nevertheless, I think that with the knowledge teenagers have today, it's easy not to get our text talk and formal language mixed up, especially with important job interviews I can assure you sentences wouldn't end with 'innit' or 'wtf'. And with there being a 'GCSE results rise in 2018 despite exams shake up', we seem to be doing just fine.

In closing, I think that attempting to mute teenager's voices and not allowing them to use language how they please is simply a silly idea. Language is constantly evolving and new words are continuously entering the scene, so before you blame teenagers for the cause of this, maybe think about focusing on more widespread issues than this mediocre one.