Youth Slang: Good Ting Innit Fam, Or Nah?
In light of growing concerns amongst many about the language of the youth and how it may affect their futures, George Jones takes a deep dive into where this language comes from and why we shouldn’t be afraid of it.
My head throbs as the train draws away from the now empty platform on a chilly Friday evening. The working week is finally over. As I search my bag for the pack of paracetamol I shoved in there a couple of weeks ago something catches my attention. Some utterances I am unable to decipher. I realise it is coming from the group of young men across the aisle from me dressed from head to toe in North Face and Nike. I assume they’re tourists visiting the city, well that is until I catch something else they say. Only one word that is though and it dawns on me they’re Londoners like myself. Only then the panic sets in. Why can’t I understand them? Have I lost my hearing? Perhaps they are speaking a foreign language? Have I been transported an alternate dimension?
No, I’m just old.
I’d personally like to think that 47 is still very much young, hip and happening but was horrified to learn from my niece a couple of weeks ago that nowadays 30 is old. 30! I’m not being funny but I would genuinely sell an arm, a leg and the extra stone I’ve gained since my 40th to be 30 again.
But that’s beside the point — although if someone is offering. The real point is that I’m not alone in my struggle to understand the way the youth speak today, in a recent article by Charlotte Edwardes, she expressed her frustration and confusion at the way her kids talk.
The article in question explored Edwardes’ children’s use of ‘text speak’ in their spoken language and the fact that the lines between written and spoken language are becoming blurred, which is something prominent linguist Gary Ives has researched.
During a case study in a West Yorkshire school involving thirty participants aged 15 years old, Ives uncovered the shocking revelation that teens were beginning to use ‘text speak’ in their everyday speech. By far the most prominent feature present in the youth’s speech was the use of text abbreviations such as ‘cba’ (can’t be arsed) and ‘wtf’ (what the fuck). As someone who studied linguistics at university and as a self-professed grammar geek, my skin begins to crawl just thinking about this.
But once I moved past the immediate horror, I realised something pretty interesting about the use of these text abbreviations in spoken language. ‘Cba’ and ‘wtf’ were the two examples of this use of text speak that Ives found which could in itself possibly explain why teens are using them — they are both connected by their use of taboo words.
It seems that the teens using these abbreviations were doing so as away to avoid conflict over their use of taboo language and getting a good telling off from their parents as we would have done back in my day. Arguably this adds a whole new dimension to the debate as youth language as these kids have made it perfectly clear that they understand how they can adapt language to their advantage, and to be honest, I’m in awe.
On top of that, studies have shown that in recent years there has been a decline in the use of text-speak in the vernacular of today’s teens and that as they develop into young adults, the lines between written and spoken text are redrawn — demonstrating just how quickly and often language can evolve and reminding us oldies that we are behind the times and that we worry too much about our teens.
Even still, some people are afraid of this phenomenon alongside the decline the increase in the number of young people deviating from standard English by using trendy slang terms such as mandem and bruv as they fear that the language of today’s youth could cause them to struggle to find employment in the future.
One very prominent critique of Multicultural British English (MBE) amongst those who have these concerns is that due to its Caribbean, African and Asian influences, young people are beginning to sound as though they belong to a different ethnic group as MBE started as an ethnolect — a dialect belonging to an ethnic group — which some fear could lead to even more employment problems.
It’s the racism for me.
Fearing young people will be judged as they ‘speak as though they belong to a different ethnic group’ only highlights the racism of MBE’s critics as fearing someone will be judged for sounding like a person of colour implies that you yourself judge the way people of colour talk. And that is not okay.
Furthermore, MBE has transpired one particular ethnic group and has become a staple of all youth language in the UK — hence the ‘multicultural’. You know ‘multi’ as in more than one and ‘cultural’ as in the identity of somewhere or someone. Goodness, explaining things to bigots really is draining.
People also needn’t worry about the long-term impacts of youth language as teens have proven time and time again that we underestimate them as every singly day they alter their language to fit in, which is something Howard Giles had explored in his accommodation theory.
Giles proposed that people accommodate their language to those they are talking to, either to fit in by mimicking their language choices (also known as convergence) or to distance themselves by differentiating their language from that of the person they are talking to (also known as divergence). Teens are notorious for converging with one another on the school yard and picking up the newest slang to seem cool.
In an interview for an article in the Independent, a thirteen-year-old high schoolboy revealed that ‘everyone’ in his school spoke using MBE as the ‘cool kids’ had started using it and everyone else had followed suit. So there you go, it’s all about social standing and hierarchy as these kids are desperate to fit in amongst their peers and converge their language so they can do so, expressing the same kind of prestige on the schoolyard that driving a Tesla or Bentley would, or having SMEG appliances. The language of the youth is about status and they must continually reaffirm their status to stay relevant in the school biosphere.
In fact, the schoolboy even went as far as to say that those who did not adopt this new MBE slang were deemed as ‘uncool’ and were outcasted, which was ‘deep’. I guess this really adds a whole new meaning to every Mother’s favourite phrase ‘If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off as well?’ — apparently this generation would, if the pressures of social media didn’t drive them to it first.
But it seems this may be their saving grace (not the social media part), these teens are developing convergence skills at such a young age and are doing so constantly, so it is likely that they could just as easily converge with the language of a potential employer or a university admissions tutor. These teens are capable of accommodating their language in the bat of an eyelid, which is more than can be said for my generation, so there is no need to worry about how the currently trendy MBE youth language might impact their future.
Really all I need to do now is learn some MBE terms so that the next time the train is full and I need to sit down, this old biddy can ask the mandem if ‘Sis can sit down cause she’s got a bad back innit famalam’ and hope they understand rather than thinking a foreign language. After all, I may be over thirty, but I’d like to think I haven’t lost my capacity to learn new things just yet.