Gender, heteroglossia and power. A sociolinguistic study of youth culture

Abstract

This book is a sociolinguistic study of youth culture. It is concerned with the way young people speak and how they construct their identities when they get together beyond the controlling grasp of parents, teachers, police officers, priests, law-abiding neighbors and any other full members of the adult world. In the peer-group context, young people engage in characteristic forms of leisure activities, interact in particular ways amongst themselves and speak in the well-known forms of slang. There have been many studies about young people under the academic label of popular culture, but very few detailed studies that focus on language and the way in which language contributes to shaping the world of youth cliques. In this study, I intend to show that discourse analysis, in the form of a close analysis of patterns of social and linguistic interaction, can make a significant contribution to our knowledge of the social world. More specifically, I will argue that the development of particular speech styles in the contexts of young people's leisure activities is intimately connected with struggles over gender, ethnicity and class relations. Gender is, as I will show, the most important aspect of social identity in the peer-group context, as it constitutes the key forms of participation and self-presentation in this domain. Ethnicity and class are also important if we wish to understand many aspects of young people's cultural practices, especially the way they use language, that is, the way they manage heteroglossia, which is the socially stratified diversity of speech forms. By incorporating the ways of speaking of various social groups in different ways, young people construct and express in a symbolic way their position vis-à-vis the relations of power that exist between these groups. The study is based on data I collected amongst two cliques of young working class people in Barcelona by means of ethnographic participation, observation, tape-recording of conversations and in-depth interviewing. Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, is a bilingual city, which means that young people there combine the use of youth slang and dialects with switching between the Catalan and Spanish languages. In this context, an analysis of everyday conversations can provide a source of very rich and complex sociolinguistic data. I have tried to explain and lay out very clearly the procedures of data analysis so that this book can be useful not only for specialists in the fields mentioned, but also for students who wish to bring some form of discourse analysis, and particularly an analysis of face-to-face interaction, into their own research.