Abstract
It is a well-known fact that the speech of young people is in many respects different from the speech of older speakers. This also applies to Afrikaans as spoken by the younger generation. The difference in speech is recognized to such an extent that the media and literature aimed at teenagers make use of the same words and phrases. That creates the impression that these publications are making use of a
specific variety of Afrikaans.
In the present study the researcher has endeavoured to describe the specific nature of teenage language as spoken by Afrikaans teenagers in a bid to establish whether Tienerafrikaans could be
considered a variety of Afrikaans.
The dissertation first looks at the linguistic research on teenage language in countries like Germany,England and the Scandinavian countries as the existing sociolinguistic descriptions of the speech of
teenagers in South Africa are inadequate while no study has yet been carried out on Afrikaans
teenage speech. The characteristics of teenage language, such as the use of slang, the use of English words by non-English speakers and the use of pragmatic markers, as observed by researchers such
as Androutsopoulos, Andersen and Stenström, served as a starting point for this study. Other
characteristics of teenage speech that were emphasised, were the function of socialisation and that teenagers use speech to set them apart from adults and to indicate their membership of the peer group.
In an attempt to describe the non-standard forms used in media and literature aimed at teenagers, an in-depth study was made of language forms that appear in Tienerafrikaans. The data for the study came from lists of words supplied by teenagers, questionnaires, letters to Jip, a teenage supplement to
Beeld, and interviews with teenagers.
The results indicated the following:
• Tienerafrikaans is an informal register of Afrikaans making use of certain linguistic phenomena,
like slang, code switching, borrowing and calque.
• The wide range of non-Afrikaans lexical items that are used by Afrikaans teenagers are mostly
derived from English.
• Afrikaans teenagers are capable of creating new words and slang expressions in Afrikaans.
The study also indicated that the claim by critics that authors made use of teenage language in books
aimed at teenage readers, is justified. To a certain extent authors made use of the same lexical items
and informal style that was identified from the data.The conclusion drawn is that the term Tienerafrikaans could be applied to the mixed language spoken
by a significant number of Afrikaans teenagers and that Tienerafrikaans is a variety of Afrikaans.
Prof. A.E. Coetzee