Stanford Professor Speaks

Why adolescents talk the way they do

By Molly Waldron

Stanford University linguistics professor Penelope Eckert discussed how speech gives teenagers the ability to distinguish themselves from adults, children, and other social groups during an event at University of Washington Tuesday evening.

Eckert, the author of six books and over sixty articles, called adolescents “the most innovative speakers” and defended the use of words such as “hella” and “bomb” as simply new forms of emphasis meant to make language more vivid. She claims the extensive use of “like” was grasped by teenagers as a means to invoke the tone of a situation.

Unhappy with how the media equates inarticulate speech with adolescence, Eckert claimed that adults have erroneously connected teen slang to laziness and hedonism, effectively antagonizing teenagers and defining them as a threat to society.

As a result of this classification, young people are forced to develop in the restricted atmosphere of high schools, where students compete for limited resources and create alliances in a constructed social world. Language conformity thus takes hold of social groups as a means to distinguish themselves from one another. Students label each other as dweebs, stoners, or preps to categorize and defend their alliances.

Eckert spent two years in the early 1980s in suburban Detroit, examining linguistic and social patterns at a middle-class high school. Her research from this study and subsequent analysis provided evidence that one large structure of students, which she refers to as “jocks,” accept the establishment of the school setting and attach their social lives to extracurricular activities and structured athletics. The opposing structure, labeled “burnouts,” reject the social forums constructed by schools and instead rely on urban areas, their neighborhoods, and local parks to provide space for unstructured recreation.

As a result of differing atmospheres in which students adapt and conform to their language, Eckert found evidence that the burnouts were more likely to use multiple negation in their speech, such as saying “I aint done nothing wrong” or “I don’t got no reason to.” Eckert sees the common use of multiple negations as an expression of opposition to institutions. Girls that classified themselves as jocks were the least likely to use multiple negation, followed by male jocks.

Eckert’s Detroit-area studies showed that the jocks were largely college-bound upper middle class students, making them more conscious of their language usage and less likely to accept slang terms as they aimed to develop favorable relationships with their high school teachers and administrators. Burnouts, on the other hand, were mostly headed for the local work force and therefore often harbored animosity towards the establishment often focused on helping students prepare for college. Because of their time spent outside of the school structure and away from organized activities, the burnouts were more likely to adopt phrases and vowel emphases developing in urban Detroit.

The audience of about 200 in the University of Washington lecture hall remained engaged throughout the presentation, laughing at Eckert’s humorous anecdotes and nodding in agreement with her solid arguments. The crowd had the opportunity to ask Eckert questions following the presentation. Almost all related their inquiries to personal experiences with language and adolescence. One individual asked Eckert her opinion on the new wave of chat lingo and abbreviations, to which Eckert responded, “Well it leaves me at a disadvantage, but I think it’s kind of cool.”
                To read more about the event and Penelope Eckert:
http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/      
http://www.grad.washington.edu/lectures/schedule08-09.htm