Teens Are, Like, Awesome Communicators
So, like, writing a blog is awesome, right? I think that I write just like I talk, except without the annoying verbal tics that I remove in the editing stages. Cuz sometimes I talk a bit like a valley girl, which is the verbiage from my rad teen years.
Some epic studies say that teens may sound like airheads with their overuse of the word "right" and ending every sentence with a question, but they may, in fact, be moving human communication forward.
It seems that as the New York Times says, teen girls are ahead of the "linguistic currrrve". A new study posits that the way they alter the language eventually gets adopted by the whole culture. The article says that while the trend towards uptalk (ending every sentence with a question) or short forms of words like "ridic" may make girls sound less intelligent, they are in fact leaders in the use of language:
But, Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang, they say, adding that young women use these embellishments in much more sophisticated ways than people tend to realize.
They use language in new ways to identify and strengthen bonds between them. Girls may also use language to show power, or to exert power in a less threatening way, right? (Kind of like the Canadian "eh?")
So, you may be tempted to try and eradicate your teen's use of short forms, or the growing trend of the "vocal fry" (extending the last vowel in a word), but then you may be extinguishing the forward movement of language. And that would, like, totally suck.
Does it drive you crazy when teens use "like" and other verbal tics? Do you find yourself adopting teen lingo?
Want more chaos? Last year, I said that I would not allow my kid to be a teen idol, but many people (including my husband) disagreed with me.
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