social groups

• berland


  language of teenagers is highly influenced by their upbringing and when communicating the same message as others, their idiolect comes across which reveals identity, arguably stemming from their upbringing. She also concluded that social class was a big factor in determining the usage of tags.

  study took place in 1997. ​She researched the use of tags amongst teenagers. ​She found links between the use of these tags and the social class of the teenagers she was studying.
• berland findings

  • ’Innit’ was most commonly used within working class communities.​
  • ‘Okay’ was used more by boys than girls.​
  • ‘Yeah’ was primarily used by middle class people.
  • These findings suggest that the language of teenagers is highly influenced by their upbringing and although they all have the same aims through their language use, their identity regardless of their age can still be seen within their speech.
• bigham


  emerging adults in the age bracket 18-25 reflects a lack of confidence about through their language use, demonstrating how this part of their lives is uncertain.

  also depicts that emerging adults are typically more open minded about topics due to a lack of plan for their future.

  • study took place in 2012.​ researched the language of emerging adults
  • ​exploration of identity
  • When asked about their sexuality, emerging adults would respond ‘Straight, I guess’
• criticism of bigham and berland


  Penelope Eckert said in 2003: “slang is used to establish connection to youth cultures to set themselves off from the older generation… to signal colonies, toughness or attitude”. This suggests the use of slang amongst teenagers and the younger age category can be influenced by other demographical factors
• harriet powney - familect

  • Powney published article in the guardian, inspired by The English Project’s “kitchen table lingo”.​
  • Kitchen Table lingo consists of “slips of the tongue that become part of the family vernacular or a word invented when all others fail”​
  • Powney references The Today Programme, in which listeners were asked to give examples of their own familect​
  • Familect follows English grammar patterns, using different vocabulary​
  • A familect can be developed by malapropisms and mispronunciations
• purpose of familect- powney

  • Powney describes the use of familect as “playful, creating a sense of belonging.”
  • However, she goes on to explain that in some contexts, it can also be exclusive and territorial, “confirming its speakers’ insider status”​
  • The article is concluded by stating that familects “illustrate how playful, creative and emotional our linguistic story and our relationship with language can be”
• cheshire

  • Cheshire concluded that male and female speakers in Reading exploited the resources of the linguistic system in different ways. ​
  • Some linguistic features were markers of vernacular loyalty for both sexes.​
  • Some features function in this way for boys/girls only.
• cheshire findings

  • Cheshire concluded that “variation is controlled by both social and linguistic factors.”​
  • In boys’ speech variation is governed by norms that are central to the vernacular culture, and are transmitted through the peer group.​
  • The research by Cheshire showed that only the non-standard auxiliary ‘do’ was used by the girls more often than the boys. The other non-standard features were used less frequently by the girls than the boys.
• cheshire linguistic data

  • Jenny Cheshire used long term participant observation to gain data about the relationship between use of grammatical variables and adherence to peer group culture by girls in Reading. She recorded how often they used non standard forms of English.​
  • She split the girls into two groups.​
  • Group A were most likely to disapprove of gang type activities including carrying weapons, fighting and swearing.​
  • Group B were more to be involved in these activities themselves.
• criticism of cheshire

  • Despite there are clearly practical advantages in restricting the study to the speech of adolescents​
  • The main disadvantage is that the study lacks explanatory power since observed patterns of variation cannot be linked with longer-term patterns of linguistic change.
• kerswill- milton keynes dialect levelling


  His research on language variation and change had emphasis on phonetic features, but also grammatical and discourse variation. The research also focused on Dialect contact. There can be long term consequences that ensure speakers of different accents and dialects come together through migration and mobility.
• kerswill findings

  investigated 10 speech sounds that have different pronunciation within Milton Keynes area. ​

  • (ou) – diphthong vowel in coat, boat, etc. The second part of diphthong can be ‘fronted’. This makes words such as ‘coke’ sound like ‘cake’. ​​
  • 48 children (dif age groups) were used for this investigation.
  • Children front their vowels more than adults, suggesting that fronted vowels is becoming a characteristic of a new Milton Keynes Dialect. This also suggests that a new ‘speech community’ is forming in Milton Keynes.
• impact of kerswills findings


  after adapting new information from Kerswill’s Dialect Levelling, older language could be declining, meaning new variations are developing within language in the modern days. There can also be factors that effect a shift of change within language, such as migration, urbanisation, status, age, gender.
• specialist lexis


  refers to the words that we use in a particular situation or social group – they don’t need to be complicated words.
• restricted lexis


  Highly specialised lexis, only used within a specific context.
• joanna thornborrow


  “One of the most fundamental ways we have of establishing our identity and shaping others’ views of who we are is through our use of language”
• eckhert - jocks and burnouts

  fieldwork for this project took place between 1980 and 1982. Involved two years of ethnographic work in one high school in the Detroit suburbs, called "Belten High", and one to two months in each of four other Detroit suburban schools.  ​In all of these schools, there was a cultural opposition between two social categories, referred to as jocks and burnouts. ​

  • The jocks were school-oriented students, embodying middle class culture. ​
  • The burnouts are a locally-oriented community of practice, embodying working class culture.
• eckhert findings


  Eckert found that people tend to speak more like their friends – those who shared social practices together – than others belonging in the same demographic category as them i.e. social class.
• eckhert differences

  • Jocks more likely to use Standard American English and sophisticated lexical choices ​
  • found that the Jocks often mirrored the language used by their teachers, while the Burnouts appeared to consciously diverge from it. ​
  • differences were not just lexical. variations in the vowel pronunciation too. words they used were different – but even when they used the same words, they often pronounced them in divergent ways. The Burnouts pronunciation was generally more ‘Urban Detroit’ in character.
• stenstrom


  many features that make up teen-speak: over-lapping, slang, tabboo, indistinct articulation
• mary bucholtz- the whiteness of nerds


  research focused on how social identities and cultural practises are brought into being through linguistic interaction

  looked to explore the diverse forms of language within California

  research in a high school in the San Francisco Bay, was interested in influence of African-American youth culture on European-American, noticed that group of students defined as nerds weren't engaging with this culture

  2 largest groups were black and white – white outnumbering black, led to smaller EG having to align themselves with either ‘whiteness’ or ‘blackness’
• the whiteness of nerds findings

  • students that embrace white identity, nerds, are seen to employ a super standard language variety in order to reject youth culture norm of coolness​
  • was observed nerds avoid slang, as big marker of youth culture
  • she spoke to some black students that had primarily non-black friendship groups and those that had been mocked by other black students for not conforming to African-American youth culture norms, however they weren’t deemed nerds – she does not believe that nerds are uniquely white, yet their behaviour is understood as white​
• criticisms of mary bucholtz

  • could be suggested that Bucholtz’s suggested traits of white nerds may lead to the belief that high academic achievement is directly linked to whiteness. However, in an interview about her article on ‘the Whiteness of Nerds’, Bucholtz claims that her goal whilst doing this research is to ‘raise awareness of nerds as an alternative to coolness’ and not nerds as inevitably aligned with ‘whiteness against blackness’
  • conducted her research in mid-1990s since this time there has been more influence from different ethnic groups in society, such as Hispanics
• communities of practice


  A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who “share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”.
• wenger

  • argues that learning is an intrinsically social process and that one of the primary sites where learning occurs in community of practice.​
  • Four premises:​
  • We are social beings; this is a central aspect of learning.​
  • Knowledge is a matter of competence with respect to valued enterprises.​
  • Knowing is a matter of participating in the pursuit of such enterprises which are active in the world​
  • Meaning, our ability to experience the world and our engagement with it as meaningful