Jugendsprache in Deutschland und Schweden : Eine kontrastive Analyse anhand zweier Online-Gemeinschaften

This thesis aims to contrast German and Swedish youth languages, based on material from two popular Online-Communities mainly for young people, SchülerVZ and Lunarstorm, respectively. The goal is not primarily to analyze the use of written, online youth language. Rather, language use on the Internet has developed into something between written and spoken language; often with clear characteristics of spoken language. Therefore, my corpus enables me to establish general similarities and differences in spoken (and written) German and Swedish youth communication. Many similarities can be found in the way both German and Swedish youth play with language through e.g. many innovative lexical combinations and hyperboles. A difference can be found in the use of dialect. German youth inclines to speak and write it more explicitly to establish a "youth identity". In contrast, Swedish youth applies multi-ethnic youth language in the same way to establish this identity. This finding leads to the conclusion that multi-ethnic youth language firstly, is a more accepted or developed medium in Sweden, and secondly, something young people can employ in their formation of an identity that goes beyond social, "adult" conventions. In addition, a common use of Anglo-American loan words, mainly through Code Switching, can be found in both languages. This occurrence of loan words ought to depend mainly on these words being more unerring or more prestigious than native alternatives. Differences in the application of these loan words are found to be on a grammatical level. The German language tends to adopt more directly imported Anglo-American loan words, whereas the Swedish language reproduces these words in order to allow integration with the Swedish language system