Youth language and forming identity in a small island community

Author(s):

Irene Løstegaard Olsen

Conference:

ECER 2008

Network:

14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

14 SES 07, Research in Rural Schools and Communities (Part 3) Community Influences

Paper Session

Time:

2008-09-11

15:30-17:00

Room:

A1 318

Chair:

Linda Mary Hargreaves

Contribution

My contribution is based on my master degree assignment in Nordic languages which deals with youth language and forming an identity in a small island community. By youth language I mean language use among youths that quantitatively and/or qualitatively differs from the elderly generation’s way of speaking. Earlier studies show that young people develop dialects either by making new linguistic variants, or by accentuating already ongoing changes. Besides, young people very often make use of an implicit and expressive conversational style (slang, swearing, sound words, and so on). In sociolinguistics youth language – and language in general – is considered as acts of identity (Le Page and Thabouret-Keller 1985). As part of a tremendous search for identity and belonging, teenagers use language, in the same way as hairstyle, clothes and music preferences, as a symbolic expression of their orientation in one direction or the other. Whatever directions these expressions take, they are more than likely to run in the opposite direction to those of parents and adults in general. So far the study of youth language has been restricted to concern language use among youths primarily in urban centres, and to a certain extent also in larger, rural districts. Because of this I chose to go to a small island community in the north of Norway to find out if the use of youth language could be similar, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to what has been found in towns. It would also be interesting to see whether the reasons for the use of it, primarily opposition towards adults, would have any similarities.

Method

The data was collected mainly through two rounds of interviews, winter and spring 2005. My informants were eleven youths (all people between 14–16 years at the island) and twelve adults (44 to 82 years). The interviews were done in accordance with the qualitative research interview (Kvale 1997), and carried out in two turns. In the first turn I interviewed both youths and adults, and in the second turn only youths. In the first turn my my main focus was to record language use, and in the second I wanted to understand the language situation.

Expected Outcomes

After analyzing the interviews I found that there indeed was a youth language on the island: The young people used a language different from their parents both in relation to dialect and conversational style. Their use of innovative dialect forms was far more frequent than the adult’s, and their conversational style was to a larger extent marked with involvement. This was among other things shown in their use of swearing and slang. Still, compared to research from towns, they had a less typical youth conversational style than what has been found among young people in more urban areas (for instance Eriksson 1992, Hasund 2000; 2001, Kotsinas 2002, Nordberg 1984, Norrby 1997, Opsahl 2002). One way to understand these results is that the youths on the island want to be both traditional and modern. They are closely related to the local, traditional culture, but at the same time they are orientated towards a more modern youth culture. As I see it, their use of youth language should not be related to adult opposition, but to a wish to “keep up” and establish a more modern lifestyle (Miles 2000).

References

A selection of references: Eriksson, Mats. 1992. Ett fall av grammatikalisering i modern svenska: ba i ungdomars talspråk. (FUMS rapport 166.) Uppsala: Uppsala universitet. Hasund, Ingrid Kristine. 2000. “Engelsk i norsk ungdomsspråk”. Språknytt 1–2/2000, s. 8–10 og 26. Hasund, Ingrid Kristine. 2001. “‘Fisefine fjortisjenter sier lissom hele tiden’. Tro og viten om småord i talespråket”. I: Forestillinger om “den andre”, red. Line Alice Ytrehus, s. 196–217.Kristiansand: Høyskoleforlaget. Kotsinas 2002. Ungdomsspråk. 2. opplag. Uppsala: Hallgren och Fallgren. Kvale, Steinar. 1997. Den kvalitativa forskningsintervjun. Oversatt av Sven-Erik Torhell. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Le Page, Robert B. og André Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of identity. Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miles, Steven. 2000. Youth lifestyles in a changing world. Buckingham: Open UniversityPress. Nordberg, Bengt. 1984. “Om ungdomars samtalsstil. Några preliminära iakttagelser”. I: Nysvenska studier. Tidskrift för svensk stil- och språkforskning 64, s. 5–27. Norrby, Catrin. 1997. “Hur länge är man ungdom – språkligt sett?” I: Ungdomsspråk i Norden. Föredrag från ett forskarsymposium, red. Ulla-Britt Kotsinas, Anna-Brita Stenström og Anna-Malin Karlsson, s. 213–222. (MINS 43.) Stockholm: Institutionen för nordiska språk, Stockholms universitet. Opsahl, Toril. 2002. Jeg bare: “Hæ?! Hva skjedde her, da?” En studie av de kommunikative funksjonene til diskurspartikkelen ‘bare’ i et ungdomsspråkmateriale. Hovedoppgave i nordisk språk. [Oslo]: Institutt for nordistikk og litteratur, Universitetet i Oslo.

Author Information

Irene Løstegaard Olsen

Høgskolen I Nesna

0452 Oslo

158

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