Aryan Erfani Within every society, a form of communication between members is necessary.

In ancient times this was done through pictures and gestures. As humans developed, we created more complex ways to communicate, eventually creating language. There was never one universal language and each civilization had its own form of it. However, just as humans evolved, our languages did as well. There are a number of factors that can cause these differentiations in language, or dialects, such as geology, age, and social differences. These are all parts to a larger concept called speech communities. The speech community I have analyzed is that of teenagers in America. The young of a country always use different speech from that of their elders. Though adults do have an influence on their language, their peers have an even stronger effect on it. Our current generation of teenagers is always discredited for the choice of words in their diction. We have followed a different path than previous groups. We do have our own slang words, a pattern that has been historically present in every generation before us, but we have adapted to start including abbreviations in our speech. Examples of these would be LOL (laugh out loud), OMG (oh my god), or a more recent one YOLO (you only live once). These have come to exist as our society has resorted to the use of electronics in our daily lives more so than other generations. These sometimes become a problem as they show up in the writing of some students. I remember when I was in my last year of middle school I had to edit a paper with nothing but internet lingo in it. The person who wrote the paper had done this completely subconsciously, because he was so used to using those terms on social networks.

I recorded my sister having a conversation with our cousin in order to further analyze teenage vernacular. The conversation was between two girls, a sub-community that I can unfortunately never be a part of but still a part of my speech community of teenagers. Though the sentence structure was completely different from what I was used to, the word choice had similar slang similar. A particular aspect of her conversation that had a strong connection to my own speech was ending a topic with the word swag, meaning cool. The popularity of using this word is very strong among teenagers, even if used mockingly. After showing my parents the recording, they couldnt understand half of what was being said and looked somewhat bothered by my sisters way of speaking. They said that she sounded very annoying and degraded her own intelligence from that conversation. I also found some parts of my sisters conversation annoying, but it was still a part of a larger speech community of teenagers so I could understand and relate to it better than my parents could. Dismissing a certain way of speaking a language as incorrect is also wrong to me. Within her sub-community, the way my sister spoke was normal and delightful to the other person in the conversation. Elders in society will always find the vernacular of a younger generation to be annoying at times, but they should never degrade and ridicule it in such a way that makes that generation feel ashamed. The existence of dialects in a language is what gives it color; to discourage their existence would be to create a single standardized form of English. As Richard Lederer says in his essay All-American Dialects, Let us hope that American English does not turn into a bland, homogenized, pasteurized, assembly line product. An interesting point that Lederer made in his essay, which pertains to my research, is that the electronic media is causing English to become more uniform. This form of media is breaking down the effect geology has on a speech community. Though he feared that this would cause

everyone to be speaking the same dialogue of English, I took it to be unifying certain speech communities together. This does result in less variety in dialogue, but each community would still have its distinct differences. Within the speech community of American teenagers, the internet has brought many phrases and words into our lingo. There are universal words and phrases that every sub-community within the larger group of teenagers would understand. A large portion of our language is affected by the media, but we still have a solid variation of dialects coming from every group of teenagers. The language that teenagers in my generation use is a factor in what ties us all together. Its value is that it gives us a sense of recognition from those in other speech communities. We have an identity from how we use the words which are popular within our community. The language we use can be viewed as the gap between our generation and our predecessors. As such, it becomes its own culture within the teenage American society. Being raised as a bilingual speaker within the teenage speech community, I have some unique values for my language. As a result of being bilingual it took me longer to be accepted within the speech group of my peers. Using words that other teenagers used made me feel a sense of belonging within my generation. I took great pride in this and it gave me a sense of security. My part within this community has developed me to become who I am today. As a generation passes on, a new one is always there to take its place. The speech of the new generation is bound to be different from the old one. Vernacular that was once frowned upon by elders becomes more acceptable as there is no one to disapprove of it anymore. This is one process that constantly repeats itself, changing language. I am curious to see how the

language of my generation will leave its mark on the history of the English language. Regardless of its effect on history, I am glad to have been a part of this speech community.