Love Ya Hate Ya The Sociolinguistic Study of Youth Language and Youth Identities

This volume shows the formidable range of variation in youth language. Youth language is analyzed as a phenomenon in negotiations of identities and social relations. The contributions particularly concentrate on youth language in late modern urban societies. This is an area of study which has been gaining increasing attention in sociolinguistics over the past few years. One observation that is almost inevitable is that there is a string of similarities to be found between youths in quite different circumstances, ranging from university students in Argentina, to juvenile delinquents in Greece and to skaters in Greenland. A wide range of language situations are covered, from Danish, Cypriot Greek, Turkish, to Spanish, Greenlandic, Norwegian, Catalan, and of course English. The articles in this anthology document and analyze linguistic youth styles and behaviors as well as attitudes. In their totality they present a picture of youth language as functional, socially valuable, and flexible, with a special emphasis on identity negotiations.