Tienerafrikaans

Abstract

Afrikaans teen-speak It is a well acknowledged fact that teenage talk, or adolescent language, differ from adult speech in many respects, and that this can be ascribed to their signalling of peer group conformity and solidarity. The sociolinguistic importance of this phenomenon is though still not fully exploited. Its innovative and pragmatic aspects and its roll in grammaticalization and language change only became apparent since the 1990s with the emergence of a number of empirical studies and publications. These are based on large corpora of teenage language for different languages like the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language" (Colt) (1993), Jugentliche und 'ihre' Sprache (1996), Deutsche Jugendsprache and Sprákkontakt och ungdomssprák i Norden (UNO) (1997-2000). For Afrikaans the first corpus of teenage language appears in Marais (2005). On the basis of these forms, collected from recorded spontaneous speech, from a questionnaire, from JIP (supplement of the Beeld newspaper) and from published youth literature, we argue in this paper that Afrikaans teenage language is coherent with international trends, that it may also be called slanguage (slangy language) as Stenström (2000) indicated for British teenagers' English, but that it differs in certain respects, due to Afrikaans teenagers' command of varieties of English and of Afrikaans.

Keywords: Afrikaans, teen-speak, slang, slanguage, slangy language

Journal for Language Teaching Vol. 39(2) 2005: 244-259