Teen Language: Baby it's like OMG: 2008

Communication is at the very core of human nature. Simply put without communication we would not be human. Human communication, whether verbal or non-verbal, works to create and maintain interdependent intricate social bonds and relationships.

Humans come with an innate ability to communicate through language. As Noam Chomsky states in, “Three models for the description of language,” the way in which they use that language is influenced by transformations, which for the purposes of this essay will be the pop culture that humans are surrounded by. Pinker and Bloom describe

“…human language faculty [as] a complex biological adaptation that evolved by natural selection for communication in a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle (Christiansen et al., 2003).”

They state that human language is composed of two parts: words and grammar. But language is so much more than just words. It is the expression of a culture’s beliefs, and the constant change it sustains; and there is no group in society that experiences and accepts change more readily than teenagers.

This essay strives to explore the impact of popular culture on language. Warfield describes popular cultures as the “[c]ultural media that express the ideas of a group to an audience at a given moment in time (Warfield, 2008),” I will discuss language as an artefact of popular culture, while exploring how the producers of this cultural artifact change over time, yet their impact remains significant. To do this I will examine three time periods: the 1950’s, the 1990’s, and the 2000’s.

Teenagers are avid consumers of popular culture. They are still defining who they are, and they use the consumption of popular culture to help discover themselves. Their consumption of pop culture is especially evident in how they use language. Slang and the denotative reassignment of words are commonplace among teens, and help to define the language of the time.

The 1950’s marked the birth of a distinct new group in society-the teenager. Up until this time children had become adults with no pause in between. All that changed after the Second World War. North America experienced post-war prosperity and the birth of suburbia, and teenagers were created (Gallant-Gardner, 2001). They were too young to remember the Depression, had not taken part in the war effort, and had plenty of time and disposable income (Gallant-Gardner, 2001); and with that pop culture’s greatest adapters were born.

The media took heed of the changing times and made movies, T.V. shows, and advertising targeted at this demographic.

The movie Gidget (Columbia Pictures, 1959) depicted a teenage girl learning how to surf and meeting boys. It portrayed teen life as it was in the 1950’s, and a large part of this portrayal was the way in which the characters spoke to one another. The unique vernacular of the 1950’s teen in this movie is especially evident when the teens converse with their parents. Using terms like, “gal”, “it’s the greatest”, and “it’s a ball”, was a way of speaking unique to the teenagers of this time.

But why did teenagers begin in the 1950’s to assert their own way of using language. Yes, they were the first generation of teenagers, but what was influencing their use of language? Gallant-Gardner, believes that the increasing importance and prominence of rock and roll music during this decade had a large effect. Rock and roll music at the time was predominately performed by African Americans, and many of that culture’s colloquialisms and slang become synonymous with rock and roll, and then gradually become part of teen language.

Teenagers of the time were eager to distinguish themselves from their parents, and new slang and connotations were the way to do it.

Teenagers began to change the connotations of words. Bread, which to an older generation meant a baked wheat loaf you eat, become to the teen generation, money (Newberry, n.d.). Baby’s denotative meaning of a child under one year of age, become a loving reference to girlfriend or boyfriend. Teenagers were taking words and altering how they were interpreted. This new language gave this group a unifying power because it gave them a distinct voice, a code that only their peers could understand.

Producers of pop culture during the 1950’s capitalized on the culture of the soda shop and hot rods, and in turn words from these activities made there way into teen language. An example of this being greasers, guys who drove hot rods with too much product in their hair. Without a culture of hot rodding, would teenagers of the 1950’s have adopted the word greaser into their vernacular? Probably not. So it appears that the power of the producer to influence teen language was strong in the 1950’s.

This trend of teenagers defining how they interpret language continues today, as each generation determines for itself how it will interact with one another.

The teenagers of the 1990’s were the first teenagers of the echo generation. As the children of baby boomers they were afforded many opportunities growing up, and were thought of as a somewhat spoiled generation. Accustomed to getting whatever they wanted, when they wanted it, this generation of teens was quick to adopt new technology in the 1990’s.

The 1990’s witnessed the rapid expansion and accessibility of technology. The Internet become available to the masses, cell phones became common, and perhaps most importantly, money was flowing, due to the booming tech market. All this set the stage for the teens of the 1990’s language trends.

The most powerful producer on teen language in the 1990’s was the communication industry and the economic strength that the North American market was experiencing. It enabled teens of this time to focus on their own needs and wants, and gave them a tool to communicate with one another in a mobile way that teens had never before experienced.

Cell phones meant that teens never had to stop talking. Once limited to the home phone line, teens were now able to take their conservations with them. The sheer volume of talk that this facilitated could explain the popularity in the 1990’s of the word like. Perhaps with so much time to fill talking, teens ran out of things to say, and needed the pause of a “like” to think of their next topic of conversation. First popularized by California Valley girls in the 1980’s, the widespread, and thorough overuse of the word like, became mainstream in 1995 with the release of the movie Clueless.

Like Gidget before it, Clueless (Paramount Pictures, 1995) centered around the charmed life of a teenaged girl named Cher. Although set in the rich L.A. neighbourhood of Beverly Hills, the teenagers in the movie spoke in a way that reflected how their generation was reacting to the world around them. Terms such as “as if,” demonstrated how the teenagers of the 1990’s were likely to respond when presented with a situation they didn’t like. The term “whatever” was also featured prominently in the movie, and showed a generation of teens so used to getting their way, that when something didn’t go their way, their response was to devaluate the situation, “whatever,” meaning this situation is not worth my time.

1990’s teen language differed from that of its 1950’s predecessor in that instead of just creating new connotations for words that already existed, the teens of the 90’s made up new words, such as “dah,” which was meant to express exasperation at a person who was not grasping the obvious.

The inclination for teens to shorten and expedite their language continued into the 2000’s. The early part of the decade saw SMS messaging and online chat increase rapidly in popularity. While teens of the 1990’s ears were clued to their cell phones, teens of the 2000’s fingers were glued to their cell phones.

The producers of SMS and texting had a profound effect on the way that teenagers of the 2000’s would communicate. At the turn of the millennium, teens were part of a culture obsessed with technology, and still riding the high of the tech boom. Technology meant that life moved quickly, and SMS and texting provided a fast form of communication.

This emergence of a new way for teens to communicate, SMS and texting, demanded a new language. Teens of the 2000’s didn’t have time to type out you, instead the letter u was used to represent you. LOL, BTW, and countless others become the new way to communicate. A condensed, sound bite driven way of conversing was born. And as to be expected, this shortened way of communicating made its way into teen’s everyday face-to-face conversations too.

The T.V. show Gossip Girl (The CW, 2007), is a good illustration of how this tech savvy, and text based teen generation has adopted shortened speech into their conversations. The show featured teenagers at a high school in Manhattan, obsessed with a local gossip site, and forever on their phones looking at it, and then texting each other with the latest news.

The acceptance of OMG, oh my god, as a meaningful form of language was exemplified by promo commercials for the latest season of Gossip Girl. In them viewers are encouraged to vote for the best OMG moment of season one.

Just as teens have always done, teens of the 2000’s have established a way of speaking, only what makes this generation of teens so interesting is that their language is influenced by written words becoming spoken words; whereas in the past the transition has gone the other way.

Many academics see this trend in 00’s teen language as a sad representation of the demise of the English language. But this is the way language as always evolved, Shakespeare himself invented 2000 words (Gill, 2008), which in his day may have seemed like a weakening of the language, whereas today his version of the English language is considered one of the highest forms of English.

To conclude, the language of teenagers has always been greatly influenced by the popular culture producers of the day. The slang and connotations among teenagers from the 1950’s to the 2000’s varies greatly, but what remains constant is the willingness of teenagers to adapt their use of language to what is going on around them.

Teen Language: Baby it's like OMG

Friday, November 21, 2008

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