Vilnius speech
Social categories of Vilnius adolescents
There are different attitudes to adolescents, most of them are, however, negative. Many must have heard the saying “back in the old days adolescents were better”. Youth speech is also often criticized for being incorrect, harsh and full of obscene swearwords and words from foreign languages. Even though youth language and culture differs from adults’ language and culture in many aspects, it doesn’t mean that it is any inferior. Youth language and culture is an important part of our community and it can be analysed in its own terms.This study is one the first cross-disciplinary studies on the social dynamics of Vilnius youth – their social groups and language. The study also gives an opportunity to hear adolescents’ opinions about themselves which are often forgotten in the discussions about the youth.
The study is based on the fieldwork, conducted in a secondary school in Vilnius. For 8 months three 8th graders classes have been observed daily. The observation was not passive; the researcher also participated in the social life of the school. This kind of method is called ethnographic. The ethnographic method not only enables the researcher to get to know adolescents better, to understand what it is important to them, this method is also useful in collecting authentic data. During the course of the fieldwork, the researcher kept the dairy where she noted what students were doing during the lessons and the breaks. Students’ verbal expressions had also been noted whenever possible. Besides the dairy, the researcher took 75 interviews with pupils, collected approximately 50 hours of adolescents’ spontaneous speech and conducted an online questionnaire survey in order to find out how students assess Russian and English swearwords in youth speech.
According to the results of the preliminary data analysis, there are two main adolescents’ social categories: Adolescents who conform to school, and adults’ norms, and adolescents who reject these norms and orient their practices towards street. (In this case, the terms school and street should be perceived in a broader sense as the terms which symbolize two different standpoints.)
Adolescents, who conform to school norms, participate actively in the lessons as well as in the extracurricular activities, such as school plays and sport matches. These students as a rule don’t smoke and drink. Besides, they are often perceived as popular by other students. Adolescents, who orient their practices towards street, smoke, drink alcohol, skip classes etc. These two categories differ not only in their social behavior, but also in language use: Street-oriented students use a lot more Russian swearwords in their speech. According to the results of additional online survey, the students themselves assess speech, full of Russian swearwords, as the speech of streetwise adolescents.