White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity

In White Kids, Mary Bucholtz investigates how white teenagers use language to display identities based on race and youth culture. Focusing on three youth styles – preppies, hip hop fans, and nerds – Bucholtz shows how white youth use a wealth of linguistic resources, from social labels to slang, from Valley Girl speech to African American English, to position themselves in the school's racialized social order. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a multiracial urban California high school, ...