Lexical Choices in Teenagers’ Speech: How Do Teenagers Talk

The present study intended to investigate lexical choices of teenagers in the society of Iran. To this aim, a convenient sample of 70 teenagers (both males and females) was recruited from several cities of Iran to participate in the study. Each of them was individually interviewed by one major question, i.e., What are the characteristics of your best friend, along with two or three follow-up questions with regard to friends and friendship. The frequencies of occurrence of the following categories were calculated: formal/informal, euphemistic, archaic/modern, abstract/concrete, forceful/hedging, surprise/emotion, literary/colloquial, slang, slant (metaphor), and code-switching terms. Having determined the frequencies, the researchers compiled the data and fed them into Excel 2016 for further analysis. The results indicated that teenagers tended to use informal terms rather than formal. Moreover, the findings showed that teenagers’ speech seemed to be mostly generated by abstract terms and they did not use archaic and surprise terms in their speech at all.

Keywords:

lexical choice , teenager talk