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Sali A. Tagliamonte. 2016. Teen talk. The language of adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xiv + 298. CAN $33.95 (softcover).
Teen talk. The language of adolescents is a new addition to Sali A. Tagliamonte's broad-ranging work in variationist sociolinguistics. In it, she offers a comprehensive account of features associated with and found in teenage speech and situates them more generally within variationist models of language change. According to the author, “Teen language is one of the most creative forms of talk and a key source of what is coming in the future of English.” (p. 40). Observations of and musings on teenage speech are common – at dinner tables, in the mainstream media, as well as in academic literature. This book addresses questions raised in all these contexts through careful, data-driven analyses, most of which come from four main corpora of Toronto English collected by Tagliamonte and her team of associates and students. These corpora span the late 1990s through 2010, although throughout, her analyses compare and contextualize results from other contemporary and historical studies. The author attends to variation in both vernacular speech and several written registers of language including computer-mediated communication such as texting (SMS), instant messaging and email. Through this work, she also addresses larger popular claims about the impact of technology on language as part of her treatment of the role of adolescents in language change at the turn of the 21st century.
Teen talk focuses on a number of frequent features, characteristic of the teenaged speakers in Tagliamonte's corpora, and her self-stated goal “is to explore the origin, pathways and impacts” of words and collocations in both teenage speech and English more generally (p. 40). The primary theoretical question of Teen talk is the extent to which its analyses support Labov's (2001) incrementation model of language change. In the book, speakers’ rates of use of incoming forms increase through childhood and youth until they stabilize in early adulthood and remain constant (p. 4). What is the contribution of younger speakers to language change? As Tagliamonte and other scholars underscore, adolescence is a time for innovation...