What their friends say about the way they talk: the metalanguage of pre-adolescent and adolescent Australians

Abstract

Adolescence is a time in young people's lives when identities are being constructed and what their friends say is particularly important. The teenage years are a critical period in terms of attitudes to language, yet there have been relatively few studies of student metalanguage and, to our knowledge, no studies which have considered age-graded differences in adolescence. This paper focuses on comments from Australian students in their initial and final years of high school about what their friends say about the way they talk. The findings, based on the written responses of 642 students to two questionnaire items, show that although there are common themes in the senior and junior students’ discourse, seniors are more likely to report that they choose their friends on the basis of the way they talk and to report that they remember their friends commenting on their speech. They are also more likely to provide detailed comment about social and regional variation. We conclude that written survey data hold explanatory power, enabling useful insights into Australian adolescent metalinguistic awareness and providing a window on ideologies and perceived identity.

Keywords:

• adolescence
• metalanguage
• metapragmatics
• metalinguistic awareness
• Australian English

Notes

1. Although ‘I got a cat’ is acceptable in standard Australian English in its sense of ‘I acquired a cat’, the student in example 5 is referring to the use of got as a possessive – as they state, in its sense of ‘I have a cat’.

2. In this sense, ‘posh’ speech in our data appears to be quite different to the stylised use of posh speech Rampton (2006) found among working-class London students. In that context, mock posh speech was used for such functions as retaliating to indignities and marking the transitions between play and work. While the brevity of the comments we are working with precludes in-depth analysis, it appears that most of the comments we have received are discussing the use of standard/hypercorrect linguistic features that are part of the students’ normal linguistic repertoire, rather than occasions where students stylised a posh variety. In other words, the comments we have around sophisticated or posh speech seem to use those terms in a similar sense to MacRuairc's definition of the ‘very posh’ speaking style, which he describes as ‘correct use of standard English, formal, very polite use of “school-type” language’ (2011, p. 544).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louisa Willoughby

Louisa Willoughby is a lecturer in linguistics at Monash University. Her research focuses on language maintenance and language issues in education, health, and disability service provision.

Donna Starks

Donna Starks is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at La Trobe University. Her research focuses on language and identity.

Kerry Taylor-Leech

Kerry Taylor-Leech is a lecturer in applied linguistics and TESOL at Griffith University. Her research explores language, education, and identity in diverse contexts.