The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture offers the first essential grounding of critical youth studies within sociolinguistic research. Young people are often seen to be at the frontline of linguistic creativity and pioneering communicative technologies. Their linguistic practices are considered a primary means of exploring linguistic change as well as the role of language in social life, such as how language and identity, ideology and power intersect.
Bringing together leading and cutting-edge perspectives from thought leaders across the globe, this handbook:
- addresses how young people's cultural practices, as well as external forces like class, gender, ethnicity and race, influence language
- Considers emotions, affect, age and ageism, materiality, embodiment and the political youth, as well as processes of unmooring language and place
- critically reflects on our understandings of terms such as 'language', 'youth' and 'culture', drawing on insights from youth studies to help contextualise age within power dynamics
- features examples from a wide range of linguistic contexts such as social media and the classroom, as well as expressions such as graffiti, gestures and different musical genres including grime and Hip-Hop.
Providing important insights into how young people think, feel, act, and communicate in the complexity of a polarised world, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture is an invaluable resource for advanced students and researchers in disciplines including Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, Multilingualism, Youth Studies and Sociology.
About the Author: Bente A. Svendsen is Professor of Multilingualism and Second Language Studies at the University of Oslo. Her research interests include citizen science, multilingualism in society across the lifespan, particularly among young people, in the family, in education and in public discourse. She is author of 'The dynamics of citizen sociolinguistics' (Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2018), the book Multilingualism - a blessing and a burden (Gyldendal, 2021, in Norwegian), co-editor of Language, Youth and Identity in the 21st Century (Cambridge, 2015) and co-author of Multilingualism and Ageing (Brill, 2020).
Rickard Jonsson is Professor and Head of Section at the department of Child and Youth studies at Stockholm University. His work explores masculinity, sexuality, race and language use in multilingual classrooms, in texts ranging from critical perspectives on narratives of failing boys in school, to students' play with tabooed language in 'Swedes Can't Swear' (2018) in Journal of Language, Identity & Education, or humor and affect in "Fear, anger and desire" (2021) (together with Franzén and Sjöblom) in Language in Society
