Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents

How do today's teenagers talk? What are the distinguishing features of their style of language, and what do they tell us about the English language more generally? Drawing on a huge corpus of examples collected over a fifteen-year period, Sali A. Tagliamonte undertakes a detailed study of adolescents' language and argues that it acts as a 'bellwether' for the future of the English language. Teenagers are often accused of 'lowering the standards' of the English language by the way they talk ...