How do children, teenagers and adults speak?
Early childhood
Language is one of the defining features of being a human being, and children’s exceptional capacity to learn the language used around them is a key part of this.
Even before they are born, while in the womb, babies acquire familiarity with their mother’s speech. In the early years of their lives, children have a unique ability to learn the patterns of speech around them, whether spoken or signed languages. Humans are hard-wired to integrate with their social group early in life.
Children tend to match the speech of their caregivers closely, and this sets an initial foundation for how language is stored in their minds. Children are incredibly good at acquiring the most complex features of language, as their ability to learn is at its peak during this life stage.
London and language development in children
In London, children aged 0-4 will be heavily influenced by the particular English accent or non-English language(s) spoken at home.
When they enter school and start to form friendships outside the home, their exposure expands to include friends’ and teachers’ speech styles. They will still not have developed a formal style, which comes later, but they may start speaking differently in different situations.
Research on the accents of young children has often been with monolingual English children in the UK or the US. However, if a child has Bangla, Polish, Jamaican Creole, Indian English, or Cockney at home, they usually do not simply replace that with the variety their peers use.
They might develop more complex situational switching patterns – changing the way they speak depending on the social group or context – or they might develop fused varieties that combine elements of the different varieties they hear.
The complexity of social environments In London is useful for testing and challenging our assumptions about how children respond to their environment.
Children and teenagers drive language change
Research has shown that the language change that happens in a community depends directly on the acquisition and communication patterns of young people at different ages.
For example, Paul Kerswill and Ann Williams (2000) examined language change in New Towns such as Milton Keynes, where adults with different accents came together in a new location.
They found that the youngest children (age 4) had accent systems that resembled those of their parents. As they grew older, children started to converge towards a new peer accent norm that was a ‘koiné’ (a common dialect that develops when two or more mutually intelligible dialects of the same language mix and simplify) of the different accents of their parents.
By age 12, they had shifted substantially towards a peer, not parent, focus.
Adolescence
Studies of teenage speech have shown that this is perhaps the most important life stage both for forming an individual identity and for the spread of new varieties of speech in the community.
In early adolescence, children hit major developmental milestones that increase their sense of an independent self. Many studies have shown an accompanying shift in speech – sometimes dramatic – towards peer-led, innovative or ‘cutting-edge’ dialect features, and often towards a more vernacular style. By the end of the teenage years, the baseline of a person’s accent for their lifetime has often been set.
Do teenagers always reject the speech style of their parents?
Again, London provides a unique opportunity to look at how these generalisations about language change and childhood development play out across different, and combined, ethnic and class identities.
For example, in Asian communities, research has shown that this ‘rejection’ of parent speech in favour of peers – with the latter displacing the former in adolescence – is not as sharp due to the joint family system in Asian communities. Adolescents retain an Asian style in their family interactions, and this cultural factor plays an important part in the community dialect that results.
Adulthood
Although adulthood is often considered a time of less linguistic change in the individual, significant changes can still take place. This is particularly true in a social environment like London, where adults may leave their home country or region and move to the city, or may experience significant social mobility, taking them into unfamiliar environments.
During young adulthood, a person will move from school to either university or their first employment. In both cases, it is common to encounter a much wider range of ways of speaking than during childhood.
Code switching: adapting to new environments
Even if someone grew up in London, they might have attended a school where their ethnic or social class background was typical for the school. University or work brings them into contact with standard speech as well as a wider range of other accents.
Socially as well, this is a stage of life where new social rules have to be taken on. Young adults typically develop their formal and standard speaking styles much more at this age. They might still retain their youth speech styles when interacting with their friends, or they may simply lose the more vernacular aspects of their speech style.
Young professionals now commonly refer to this regular switching from vernacular to work-oriented ways of being, in speech and other behaviours, as ‘code-switching’ (a term with a slightly different meaning within linguistics).
Later adulthood
In mid-life, adults will tend to converge towards standard speech norms for workplaces, though that will depend on the profession. In addition to professional roles, they might become parents too, and although child-directed speech can vary across parents, it can shift slightly towards a standard norm.
Interestingly, in later life, when people move into retirement, they sometimes shed some of that standard repertoire in their speech and become more vernacular again.