Teenage girls are our linguistic trailblazers

September 13, 2024 7:15 PM

The way teenage girls speak is often derided, but they are in fact our linguistic trailblazers. Teenage girls are the main accelerators of how language changes and evolves. It's a reminder that the most influential people in our society aren't always the most obvious.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (64 comments total)

omg
posted by HearHere at 7:22 PM on September 13, 2024 [9 favorites]

What, EVER
posted by potrzebie at 7:50 PM on September 13, 2024 [10 favorites]

Like, totally. Fer sher. SLYT (Moon Unit, looking back 40 years later.)
posted by johnabbe at 7:54 PM on September 13, 2024 [6 favorites]

That "in" list is pretty skibidi toilet ohio sigma.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:04 PM on September 13, 2024 [4 favorites]

Has Fetch happened yet?
posted by LeRoienJaune at 8:10 PM on September 13, 2024 [18 favorites]

(The best part is that I knew what skibidi toilet was way before my 16 year old daughter wrapped it into her vocabulary and it completely threw her off her game for about half a minute.)
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:12 PM on September 13, 2024 [9 favorites]

It's OK to be cheugy.
posted by flabdablet at 8:30 PM on September 13, 2024 [1 favorite]

This reminds of when Dr Geoff Lindsey took on vocal fry on his YouTube channel. Despite the inflammatory headline, it's a delightful run down of creaky voice, its perception as a young woman's affectation, and how that's wildly wrong.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 8:37 PM on September 13, 2024 [8 favorites]

I realize that this is actual research on the matter, but I thought that it was a well-known fact that women in general and young women in particular are the forefront of linguistic change?
posted by signal at 8:40 PM on September 13, 2024 [13 favorites]

To be fair to poor Moon Unit and her peers, it’s been a long time since I heard anyone complain about the use of “like” as a particle. It’s pretty well accepted in casual speech.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:51 PM on September 13, 2024 [9 favorites]

It's not a coincidence that quite often progress is only made when teenage girls and young women decide they have had enough of our collective BS, linguistically or otherwise.
posted by maxwelton at 8:58 PM on September 13, 2024 [6 favorites]

there was a post I saw talking about the word "like" as in "So I was all, like 'whatever' and she was all like "you're not even helping" and stuff -- in that "like" has taken on a new meaning in this context to indicate "something was said, but this is not a direct quote, only an approximation" because if "So I said, "It is OVER", and he said "No it AINT, BITCH" "-- that is more clearly implying acutal direct quotation. ("went" and "go", also, as in " And she went, "way!" and I go "No way!" are more often used for close paraphrases instead of general meaning as "like" is used) and that this is how language evolves
posted by The otter lady at 9:16 PM on September 13, 2024 [23 favorites]

oh, sorry, ChatGPT for those who don't speak stoned otter lady:

In modern informal speech, words like "like" have taken on a role as markers of approximation, particularly in recounting conversations. When someone says, "And I was like, 'whatever,'" they aren't quoting verbatim but signaling that the words reflect the gist or emotional tone rather than an exact quote. Similarly, "went" and "go," in expressions like "And she goes, 'no way!'" tend to imply a paraphrase close to the original words but aren't necessarily precise.

This evolution of language allows for more fluid and expressive storytelling, emphasizing how things felt rather than the exact wording. It's a natural part of language development, where words shift meaning to fit new social functions.
posted by The otter lady at 9:17 PM on September 13, 2024 [1 favorite]

And girls don’t do well, when there’s no one to talk to.
posted by jamjam at 9:22 PM on September 13, 2024 [1 favorite]

I feel there might be a need to distinguish between long-term language change and ephemeral teen culture.
posted by Phanx at 10:45 PM on September 13, 2024 [5 favorites]

So they're to blame.
posted by star gentle uterus at 11:10 PM on September 13, 2024 [1 favorite]

First well thought out post. Yes, Moon Zappa was a trail blazer as her father Frank. Reminds me of my adolescents "Gag me with a spoon". The preppy years of the 80s. I ran across this news. My first thoughts reflecting back in time. Is,
Moon Zappa would have not, today. Recalling this genre in junior high. Most teenage girls I knew, had the valley girl dictionary in their school desk. Heck, I wanted to be so "preppy". I wore Cohan, penny loafers in PE class playing football. I hope I am not derailing the thread here.
posted by thomcatspike at 11:17 PM on September 13, 2024 [4 favorites]

> I thought that it was a well-known fact

It does say that. "The discovery that young women drive linguistic change is not new". Still a fun article and some phrases with which I can annoy my nieces.
posted by paduasoy at 11:38 PM on September 13, 2024 [3 favorites]

Oh yeah there’s brief bit in the extremely great book Because Internet about how women, especially teenage girls, are the primary sources of linguistic innovation. It’s “water is wet” levels of self-evident within the field of linguistics. The pithy way it’s sometimes described is “boys learn their native language from their moms, and girls learn their native language from one another.”
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:46 AM on September 14, 2024 [9 favorites]

To zoom out the context here. Snow monkeys nihon zaru Macaca fuscata have been subject to investigation by Japanese primatologists since ever. They used to lay out sweet potatoes on the beach to attract the macaques close enough to observe them behaving. The macaques relished the sweet potatoes but hated the sand and spent a long time brushing as much off as possible. In 1953, an immature female called (by the human observers) Imo took a sweet potato down to the sea and washed off the sand. Not only was this much more efficient, it made the whole thing taste better and she used to dip the tuber in the water between bites. Interestingly, other macaques rapidly caught on to this useful habit. Some more rapidly than others: the first to catch on were other immature females, then immature males, then adult females and even … finally … The Patriarchy. 3 years later Imo generalized her culinary skills to separating wheat from sand by throwing handfuls in the sea.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:10 AM on September 14, 2024 [32 favorites]

"Women seem to have an innate linguistic ability that's superior to men's," she says.

I don't know, I feel like if you're going to throw out biological essentialism stuff like that, you should make sure to support it with lots of evidence.
posted by trig at 2:55 AM on September 14, 2024 [24 favorites]

Back on the subject as there is more we did not read..."Often slang has originated from marginalised groups such as the queer community or POC (People of Colour).My point - in England
A common phrase when out and about is..."May I have a blow of your fag?". In the USA it it not even close in translation NSFW;. So fun communication is "slang?"
posted by thomcatspike at 4:09 AM on September 14, 2024 [3 favorites]

Who run the world?
posted by theora55 at 4:31 AM on September 14, 2024

"Women seem to have an innate linguistic ability that's superior to men's"

I'm inclined to shy away from the label "superiority," but (first let's get my biases out of the way and also my concern to be fair in an unfair world, anyway) the difference comes from testosterone and impulse control -- immature males have under-developed pre-frontal cortex that regulates impulsivity and just act, while institute females might hold back the impulse and merely imagine the activity -- so maybe the difference gives rise to "not busy acting, instead busy communicating" ??
posted by k3ninho at 4:41 AM on September 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

I had an inkling, so gave the article a quick scan....

Alison's daughters are dedicated consumers of TikTok and reality TV, and their mother says they are constantly picking up and incorporating cultural references.

It's worth noting that many of these references stem from marginalised communities whose cultural products have entered the mainstream; take the hugely popular RuPaul's Drag Race or Beyonce's viral album, Cowboy Carter, which centres African-American culture.

And then I read the sample list of words. "Many"?? Try "all". It reminds me of my friend telling me that her tween girl child was teaching her "slay" and how it's Gen Z English, and I realized that somehow we may have been friends since school but we have definitely kept different companies and classes of English. I think the divergence happened as fandom splits into different spaces not to mention irl lifestyles because I had picked up queer lingo so to see those old words explained to me as Gen Z English was definitely a moment.

There's a separate dimension to the globalization of marginalized subculture English but not in a way that doesn't gloss over or erases their particularity unfortunately. It used to be, for outside the USA, and here in the British Commonwealth, you need to be a specific nerd for American pop culture if you turn out to be an Aussie who raps like Iggy Azalea (versus an Aussie who does country like Keith Urban) - there needs to be a medium of white usage first to make the transfer (cue everyone sounding like a Southern Californian in the 1990s, but of the Bill & Ted kind). Now everyone sounds Black without necessarily recognizing either that or their respective racism/colourism (Subcontinent Indian anglophone is rife with such callouts and thinkpieces). And in any case, you can absolutely see the gendered dimension still - barely any lingo for the boy-streamer and gamer side of things necessarily makes the jump into everyday parlance even if they get eyeballs from the same foreign regions.
posted by cendawanita at 4:50 AM on September 14, 2024 [12 favorites]

Grody to the max.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 5:25 AM on September 14, 2024 [3 favorites]

immature males have underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex

There's a lot of junk science about teenagers' brains, and the "impulsive because of under-developed pre-frontal cortex" is an often used example.

More reading on why it's not that simple, or possibly not even a thing
posted by Zumbador at 5:34 AM on September 14, 2024 [8 favorites]

In modern informal speech, words like "like" have taken on a role as markers of approximation, particularly in recounting conversations

Now do the overuse of "tipo" as infill among speakers of Brazilian Portuguese.
posted by chavenet at 5:51 AM on September 14, 2024

Grody to the max.

To the max? In this economy?
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:26 AM on September 14, 2024 [13 favorites]

I love the way my daughters and their friends speak: I'm a linguist by trade so it's endlessly fascinating how words get detached from their original meanings and given new ones. The one that took me a while was punctuation: as a very properly raised Gen X person, I use semicolons and periods and everything else as they were intended to be used. But it took me a few months to sort out that texting Daughter 1 with You need to block off time to study algebra tonight. is completely different from you need to block off time to study algebra tonight with no period nor capital letter. To me, the first is good communication and the second a bit sloppy, but to her the second one is just a reminder and the first one means I'm thoroughly pissed off.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:41 AM on September 14, 2024 [19 favorites]

Will everyone start using a High Rising Terminal?
posted by ovvl at 7:00 AM on September 14, 2024

There's a saying "If you took everything black or Jewish or gay out of American culture, all you'd be left with is Let's Make a Deal." And even that's not true, because Monty Hall is Canadian Jewish & Wayne Brady also hosted the show.
posted by jonp72 at 7:00 AM on September 14, 2024 [11 favorites]

I wore Cohan, penny loafers

Cole Haan?

I wore Bass Weejuns. Still do.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:04 AM on September 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

I also don't love the gender essentialism in the article, but it's kind of beside the point; when I was an undergrad in linguistics one of my faculty was publishing on autistic people being a source of language change, with highly-connected friends as the conduit to 'mainstream' usage. I think he was onto something, and I think "language change originates in Black and queer and Jewish communities" and "language change originates with teen girls" are all onto something. Language change starts at the margins, the fringes of language communities, and moves inward. And teen girls are often pushed out to the fringes.
posted by capricorn at 7:20 AM on September 14, 2024 [11 favorites]

> To me, the first is good communication and the second a bit sloppy, but to her the second one is just a reminder and the first one means I'm thoroughly pissed off.

I'm given to understand the second, being "incomplete," invites response.
posted by lhauser at 7:35 AM on September 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

Is there another 'Fetch' than the one I think of? Because I'm 54 and my grandfather told me to 'Fetch' things all the time.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:59 AM on September 14, 2024

Yasss, we cheerfully added this post to the sidebar and Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:01 AM on September 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

>Language change starts at the margins, the fringes of language communities, and moves inward. And teen girls are often pushed out to the fringes.

This feels right to me. My absolutely unsubstantiated notion is that the reason these communities are all on the vanguard of communication is because they're in communication with each other trying to articulate and understand the perspectives of each other to better equip themselves to deal with the "center," which eventually magpies what it finds most useful.
posted by bookwo3107 at 8:26 AM on September 14, 2024 [8 favorites]

Teen girls have also come up with ways to have conversations that outsiders can't understand. The variant used where I grew up was called Ab. The syllable 'ab' was inserted into words according to rules I don't really remember. My sister and her friends could speak it just as fast as regular speech and understand each other perfectly. I'm not great at processing spoken words (possibly connected to my autism) and was never able to speak it or understand it myself.
posted by LindsayIrene at 9:10 AM on September 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

Reminds me of my adolescents "Gag me with a spoon".

My sister and I thought it was hilarious to answer that with, "Butter me with a knife!"
posted by pangolin party at 9:11 AM on September 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

>> Cole Haan?

> I wore Bass Weejuns. Still do.

Hi.
posted by Sperry Topsider at 9:16 AM on September 14, 2024 [10 favorites]

Is there another 'Fetch' than the one I think of?

zengargoyle, it's a Mean Girls reference:

Gretchen: That is so fetch!
Regina: Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen! It's not going to happen!
posted by joannemerriam at 9:32 AM on September 14, 2024 [4 favorites]

Minor correction: Moon Unit was not herself a Valley Girl and wrote those lyrics to make fun of their way of speaking.
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:22 AM on September 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

Teen girls occupy a weird space: they are often tastemakers musically and linguistically and stylistically yet they are mocked for just being a girl at all. We don't take teenage girls seriously. Anything they like must be vapid or pointless, and yet. I dunno, my two teenage nieces are just so interesting to me as an adult. Like, being fifteen is a universal experience no matter where you are, and it's so compelling from the outside perspective of me, their aunt. Especially when I see how the men in their lives treat them as having no real agency or "real" interests (their dad, the grandpas on both sides).
posted by Kitteh at 11:52 AM on September 14, 2024 [8 favorites]

this is a really interesting conversation y'all.

I also feel like the teen years are when girls become CONSUMERS. capitalism wants to make them happy by rewarding their wants and needs.
posted by supermedusa at 12:49 PM on September 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

to clarify: what I mean by that (I think) is that is one place where young women get to be HEARD.
posted by supermedusa at 1:03 PM on September 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

In the apartment building where we lived for a few years before we bought our current place, there were all kinds of problems with people stealing packages, so they went to a service where you'd have packages sent to it and then they'd send a notification, and you could pick a rough time frame for the service to send a runner over with the package. I didn't like it at first, but it turned out to work pretty well.

The service's name? Fetch. So, they actually did make Fetch happen.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 2:04 PM on September 14, 2024 [9 favorites]

Look it's just a matter of time. The current trend is shortening words. Charisma became rizz. Cringey became cringe. Middling became mid. Fetching will surely become fetch.
posted by trig at 2:24 PM on September 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

Aesthetically pleasing has simply become "aesthetic". As in "that tree is so aesthetic."

However, I'll suggest a more cynical corollary to the theory above that the marginalized drive originally in language because of their need to inter-communicate:

The Patriarchy and the mainstream get bored. Not a joke, if you need to be heard in the culture your reliable language gets as bland as English food until the most compelling thing is the spice and exoticism of those who are already enticing and vaguely titillating. Not to you , of course, but to your audience. It's hard to sell unless you get heard and nothing breaks the monotony of advertising like injections of spicy novel linguistics that - thanks to these juicy fat linguistic centers - spread deliciously fast and might carry my precious brand sentiment along with it.
posted by Lenie Clarke at 3:15 PM on September 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

so, six sisters, a grandmother that lived to be 103, my mother who still drives a jet ski 82. "When language changes, it's a complex adaptive system. It is not the same change from one generation to the next, as each generation distinguishes itself from another," (from article)
I think this is true , go back to the jazz age, the 1920s in the letters that my grandfather and grandmother wrote to each other. my grandfather dropped out of college after 2 years and seemed to travel around America and wrote her every week with stationary from a different hotel, it must be 25 letters and they're all mundane. my grandmothers letters were fewer and shorter and are interwined with her college work, social life, family, mutual friends etc. it if as though my grandfather is writing straight forward texts and my grandmother was writing shorter inner textual messages. so this is puzzled my mother and I for about 3 years and I came to a conclusion that since my grandfather dropped out after two years, he was trying to find work and was trying to stay in contact with my grandmother, cuz he loved her, he really did have a big heart.

"What seems to happen is that women use language as social and symbolic capital," she says." (ibid.)
from my perspective, there might be a little bit more and this is not just capital but of norms or Linguistic, I don't know, shield for the blunt/blurry behavior of society as a whole. as to shortening words I think a lot of people observe this has happened with every generation for example in mine it was mid grade ( marijuana) to "mids" or " reg".
just a hair above snickle Fritz. my grandmother was a stickler for the English language but she would use occasional words like hi-fi for stereo.

it's really interesting as I noticed the same traits in my grandmother's grandmother's letters to her grandfather in the mid 1800s.
posted by clavdivs at 3:42 PM on September 14, 2024 [3 favorites]

re: slang originating with minority groups

> looking for a new slang
> ask the slang receptionist if their slang is new gen z or decades-old AAVE
> she doesn't understand
> pull out illustrated diagram explaining generational baseline shifts and African-American vernacular English
> she laughs and says "it's good slang sir"
> buy a membership
> it's AAVE
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:35 PM on September 14, 2024 [9 favorites]

"I also feel like the teen years are when girls become CONSUMERS. capitalism wants to make them happy by rewarding their wants and needs.
posted by supermedusa"
...You defined economics in developing a mall. I only shop at boutiques. As more personal meeting the owner when reaching for my wallet.
posted by thomcatspike at 5:24 PM on September 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

A song from the era of topic for my apology in slang, sloppy typing above.
posted by thomcatspike at 5:49 PM on September 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

Connie Willis’ book Bellwether seems pertinent here…
posted by susiswimmer at 6:03 PM on September 14, 2024 [3 favorites]

ChatGPT for those who don't speak stoned otter lady

otter lady, I thought your explaination was much better than the GPT version
posted by straight at 6:42 PM on September 14, 2024 [5 favorites]

Connie Willis’ book Bellwether seems pertinent here…
posted by susiswimmer
Are we discussing fads or genre in words here? A fad has a price tag. My dictionary is free at all Public Libraries.
posted by thomcatspike at 10:11 PM on September 14, 2024

> Cole Haan?

> I wore Bass Weejuns. Still do.

Hi.
posted by Sperry Topsider at 11:16 AM on September 14 No wonder this thread was sent to side bar. Thought a compliment, least not. Above shows how easy it is to be a member. I must be old in knowing how hard. But above; stay young as that much is easier (no meta-talk).
posted by thomcatspike at 11:19 PM on September 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

Many of the examples they shared (Bet, You devoured / You ate, Slaps) are not "teen girl slang"; they are BLACK AMERICAN words. The theft, appropriation, plagiarism, and whitewashing of Black American culture is endlessssss
posted by nouvelle-personne at 6:22 AM on September 15, 2024 [13 favorites]

There are a few things that bother me about the “teenage girls are linguistic innovators” articles that run every few years.

Saying that teenage girls are “linguistic innovators” feels feminist, right? You’re taking the experience of a marginalized group seriously. The problem with the way these articles run is that they always focus on white teenagers from affluent families. For all of the marginalization teenage girls experience, the teen girls who are the subject of these articles are more likely to be taken seriously than their Black peers, and when they use words that originated in Black communities, they’re seen as cute…where the Black teenage girls who originate this language are seen as “tacky” or “inarticulate” for using this language. Look at Peaches Monroee, who first used the phrase “on fleek” only to be written out of history while white girls ran it into the ground. Why are these rah-rah girl power articles always about affluent white teenage girls and not about the Black teenage girls who create and popularize these phrases?

It’s also frustrating to see the way phrases from the Black queer community get popularized by teenage girls while the Black queer people who created these phrases are erased from any position they might have as linguistic innovators. In this thread I’ve seen “slay” and “yass” credited to teenage girls, when the first time they were used in the mainstream was on Drag Race. Why isn’t RuPaul seen as a language innovator the way the young affluent white women who adopted his contestants’ language are?

(I’m deliberately using AAE as an example here because I’ve worked with Black women in their 20s and have heard them use this language in conversation six months before their white peers start using it.)

The other thing that bothers me is that we never discuss the ways that some of these linguistic “innovations” affects disabled people. One of my professors in college had such chronic upspeak that one of my classmates—who had been diagnosed with autism—would raise his hand to answer the questions he thought she was asking; those who are hard of hearing struggle to understand those who use vocal fry; etc.

It’s nice that suburban white girls have big, splashy articles about their speaking habits. It’s too bad that the Black girls and drag queens don’t get the same consideration.
posted by pxe2000 at 7:00 AM on September 15, 2024 [14 favorites]

You defined economics in developing a mall

well, I did grow up in New Jersey...
posted by supermedusa at 11:53 AM on September 15, 2024 [1 favorite]

As the parent of daughters, I support this conclusion.
posted by XenopusRex at 3:43 AM on September 16, 2024

Thanks to my friend sharing this IG reel (probably also a TikTok) where apparently people complain that "no worries" is a rude way to say you're welcome, which reminds me that the erasure of anything non-American standard of its origin and instead only as "Gen Z English" doesn't just happen to AAVE and considering the Australian article of the FPP (whose writer would probably didn't notice) then I think it's only fair that I mention Aussie/NZ English has also been subsumed into this specific global English - the "naur" meme is a strong example, but yeah, I do see "no worries" in unusual places. Shoe's on the other foot.
posted by cendawanita at 12:19 AM on September 23, 2024 [1 favorite]

The antipodes would collapse if 'no worries' or 'no probs' or 'no wucken furries' were considered rude.
posted by phigmov at 12:32 AM on September 23, 2024 [3 favorites]

Then they better brace themselves the ("proper") English police have set it in their sights.
posted by cendawanita at 1:43 AM on September 23, 2024 [1 favorite]