Youth speech, youth identities, and music worlds in Sweden: Four high-school girls describe music

Abstract

This article investigates the linguistic means used by four female high-school students to describe various types of music and focuses on how such descriptions are modified and what music worlds and social identities the girls thus construct. The conversation is part of a Swedish corpus of informal interviews with teenagers about music (the GSM corpus). Applying the parameters specific-general, precise-vague, real-hypothetical, and concrete-abstract, the analysis demonstrates that different styles of music generate qualitatively different descriptions. The results indicate that when describing well-known music where the girls can assume they share the same values, they construct concrete, specific, and unmitigated descriptions. However, music styles within contemporary youth culture where the girls might be less familiar with each others views, tend to lead to a cautious style where heavily modified or general descriptions are used as a face-saving strategy. Finally, music with which young people are likely to be unfamiliar is mainly described by means of associations to other things, and overall these descriptions are tentative, hypothetical, and imprecise. By prolific use of the discourse marker typ', the girls not only make these descriptions approximate and imprecise, but also perform their identity as young people.