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Keeping Up

I am definitely not in the company of teenage girls driving the future of language. I thought middle-schoolers said Ick and Lit was still in circulation - wrong on both counts. Not sure if staying current with the trends will actually help me other than being able to understand conversations between young women that I am not a part of

The discovery that young women drive linguistic change is not new.

More than two decades ago, William Labov, the founder of modern sociolinguistics studies, observed that women lead 90 per cent of linguistic change.

Then in 2003, linguists surveyed 6,000 letters, written between 1417 to 1681. 

The study found there was a quicker uptake of new language contained within the letters written by women compared to those written by men.

By the time it becomes acceptable for someone my age to use the vocabulary invented by such young trailblazers, that is old, dated and unfashionable language anyway. Speaking like kids would only make everyone feel awkward and weirded out. We like the generations in their lanes.

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