Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings (review)

A large number of different types of text corpora are used nowadays to provide detailed descriptions of different language varieties. So far, however, the language of adolescents has not received much attention from linguists. A pioneering project in this research field is COLT, the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language. The nine chapters in Trends in teenage talk provide a detailed description of the design and compilation of COLT (Chs. 1–3) and offer accounts of an interesting range of research projects based on the corpus (Chs. 4–8),describing some of the central features of the language of adolescents.

After a brief introduction that gives answers to the question ‘Why study teenage talk?’, Ch. 1, ‘From tape to CD-ROM’, describes the technical steps taken in the compilation of the COLT CD-ROM package. In Ch. 2 the reader is introduced to ‘The speakers’ and to the relevant nonlinguistic parameters (speaker age, gender, ethnicity, social class, region of residence) according to which the COLT teenagers differ. Ch. 3 provides a detailed description of ‘The conversations’ included in the corpus and subdivides them according to participant frameworks and conversation topics (e.g. ‘school’ or ‘the body’).

Ch. 4, entitled ‘Slanguage’, focuses on slang, one of the most salient features of teenage talk. The authors present an overview of the use of swear words, vague words, and different types of slang expressions like wicked (‘proper slang’) or crap (‘dirty slang’) in the adolescents’ conversations, relating them to speaker gender, age, and school borough. Since reporting the speech of others seems to be typical of teenage talk, Ch. 5 centers on ‘Variation in the use of reported speech’. It discusses how COLT speakers introduce the utterances of others and what determines their choice of quotative verb (e.g. go vs. say) and verb form (e.g. simple vs. progressive). Ch. 6 deals with ‘Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers’ such as really or absolutely and compares the COLT findings with figures from the spoken part of the British National Corpus, thus enabling a comparison between teenagers and adolescents. This chapter includes some very interesting findings regarding grammar (e.g. on the use of well in line with very [it’s well wicked]) and morphology (e.g. on the increasing use of real instead of really). Ch. 7, ‘Teenagers’ use of tags’, discusses invariant tags such as right, eh, yeah, and innit as another trendy phenomenon in teenage talk. The focus is on the interactional and textual functions of these apparent universals of adolescent language. In Ch. 8 the authors demonstrate how some of the female COLT speakers engage in what is called ‘Ritual conflict’, that is, a verbal (usually humorous) dispute among teenagers. Ch. 9 concludes the book and stresses the importance of further analyses of teenage language.

Trends in teenage talk gives an informative account of the main features and developments in the language of London teenagers in the early 1990s. It is an informative and entertaining book on a fascinating research topic: the language of children on their way to becoming adults.