Ungdomsspråk och språkförändring: tonåringars och pensionärers attityder till några ungdomliga uttryck

This sociolinguistic bachelor thesis concerns the attitudes towards youth language and language changes in the Swedish language. A lot of sociolingustic research has been done on the field of both youth language and language changes, but there are no previous Swedish research concerning the same questions as in this study. This is an apparent-time study with a synchronous perspective and only one point in time for collecting data through a survey. Labov’s studies in Martha’s Vineyard are similar to this, because he too was examining the usage of a certain lingustic variation over time. Lexemes used in informal speech, found in blogs written by young Swedes, were examined to clarify what people thought of them based on understanding, usage and attitudes. The expressions examined were fett bra (’very good’ or ’awesome’), sjukt bra (’very good’ or ’awesome’), hänga (’hang out’), rocka (’rock’ as in ’we rock this party’) and taggad (’psyched for a party’). A survey sent to Swedish native speakers aged 15-20, 41-50 and 61-100 years, showed that the studied expressions was used mostly by teenagers. However, the attitudes towards the expressions were not only positive even by the teenagers who used them. Most of them were classified as bad language and slang