Is Slang Ruining Young People's Brains?
- The CLV Phoenix
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Fallon McGahon
I was scrolling through Facebook when an article of this topic caught my eye. So, are you lost on teenspeak? Well read this guide to understanding your children and build a connection with them. It is used for many reasons and no, it isn't ruining their brain. If anything, it's actually challenging them intellectually because it allows them to use their brain in new ways and think of new variations of a word or new shortenings of words as well as many other things alongside these.
The first of which is to build communities between groups of young people. Imagine you were the only one who didn’t understand the joke, you would feel really left out right? This is the same with the children of today, the new teenspeak or “slang” helps them build friendships with like minded people. A linguist from Kansas, called Kohn, conducted some research in the early 2000s to find out how much a person's vernacular changes over time and for what reasons. During this experiment, she found out that there are reasons for change in language. It's actually the pronunciation of words that change over time where it can be influenced by age, region, occupation, exposure to various inputs and social factors. This includes idiolect and the way teens use slang. Maybe the next time your kids use slang, ask them about it and learn so you can understand them next time.
In addition, another linguist, called Stenstrom, did research in 2002 to find out the features of teenspeak. She discovered that common features include slang, taboo topics, word shortenings and many more. This is just the way your child speaks, you most likely had slang from your childhood. I can guarantee that words such as “awesome” and “dude” were slang but have become more common appearances in language today. And yes, these words can fall out of use over time but they will never not be used, someone somewhere will remember them or still use them. To quote an article I’ve recently read, “Jennifer Dorman said that slang is, by definition, just informal language”.
To answer the question. No, slang is not ruining young people, and yes. It is a normal part of teen life. In 1982, a linguist called Gumperz came up with the idea that we code-switch all the time in our use of language. The best example is the ‘telephone voice’. I know you all do it! When we pick up the phone, we switch to a posher or more sophisticated voice so we sound more polite and like a better person. Gumperz defines code switching as “the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passengers of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems”. Another great example of it is when a relative who speaks two languages starts speaking in one, then says the odd word in the other language because they can’t remember it in the first. This is what teens do, they switch their language depending on who they are with or who they are talking to. We do it too, it's just that teens do it more because they see a wider variety of people every day at school and in extra-curriculars.
To conclude, teenspeak is just a different version of language and it isn’t ruining your children. If anything, it's allowing them to explore all variations of language and decide for themselves if it's ruining them or their friends. If you just let them speak, it will fade eventually just like all slang does.
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