Language Change Over Time - Essay Practice

Referring in detail to text P and to relevant ideas from language study, explore how attitudes to language alter over time, how language changes and how these changes are reported.

 

G - News article/report

A - Adults with teenage children

P - To inform and persuade to use the charity links etc.

 

Text P is an online article from the Mail Online written in 2008 for adults that have teenage children, or even work with teenagers. The article was written with the purpose to inform the reader about slang words that are entering language, as well as to persuade them to use the "gotateenager" website, charity hotlines and watch the web shows that the author has advertised within the article.

 

The text throughout uses more of a descriptive attitude to talk about slang, however has a sort of hidden prescriptive attitude that shows that adults do have anxiety when it comes to the language that teenagers around them are beginning to use. This is obvious through the advertisement of a "24-hour helpline" for parents who were "struggling to understand their children" as well as the way the article suggests "the key to a good relationship between parents and children is communication" implying that there is a good and bad relationship for a parent to have with their children.

 

Slang is a type of language that is considered very colloquial, used often in speech or in informal types of text for example in text messages. It can be argued that the use of slang relates to the sociolect a person has (which could consider their age or class, etc.) In this case, it relates to teenagers in the UK being the only people to recognise and use the slang in question. The slang being spoken about has a covert prestige, as it isn't widely recognised, hence the article's purpose to educate the reader on its meaning. It gives the idea that the article is attempting to make the covert more of an overt prestige, which could become widely and commonly used by more than one sociolect. The article relates to Howard Giles' theory of communication accomodation, and his idea of convergence. He would suggest that by reading this article, parents are trying to converge their language, allowing it to become similar, if not identical to those of their children, through the use of slang.

 

Jean Aitchson suggests that people use things like slang as an ease of articulation - it is a much easier and quicker way of saying things in everyday lives and conversations. Slang can be created in many ways, for example coinage. Coinage is very familiar in language as i is the general creation of an entirely new word, such as "blud". Other ways that we can create slang are through techniques like blending. The words "crunk" - a blend of crazy and drunk, and also "neeky" - a combination of nerdy and geeky, create an easy way for an individual to say two words at the same time. Other ways to ease our articulation and create slang could be through clipping. Clipping consists of removing part of a word - be it from the middle or the end, to make the word shorter, or easier to say. An example of this is "rents", abbreviated from "parents". The words mean exactly the same, just "rents" is considered a much faster way of referring to one's mother or father.

 

Ease of articulation has also been seen to occur in written language, alongside speech. By phonetically spelling a word (spelling it exactly how it sounds) for example "wagwaan", allows the word to be typed and understood very easily. The word doesn't consist of for instance silent letters, like perhaps an "h" to create "wagwhan", as this makes the word much more complex to write in a very fast paced article such as a text message to a friend.

 

Through language techniques like slang, we have seen the informalisation of language. It can be argued that progressively language is becoming more informal, as social media and networks are becoming more popular and important and people prefer to send and receive information in a simpler and faster way. Techniques like slang over time have very much become codified, meaning that they're being commonly more recognised and accepted into language and people's sociolect. However, it doesn't necessarily mean that slang will be used and seen in every type of language and conversation, as speech still consists of code switching. By code switching, individuals are very easily able to alter and adapt their language depending on the context they're in, being for example in an interview, where an individual feels they should speak very formally, using the correct pronunciation and stretching their vocabulary, in comparison to talking to their best friend, where they can be very lazy with language and colloquial.