ABSTRACT
The linguistic practices of people we call ‘young’ have been of much interest in the broad domain of sociolinguistics. This chapter will discuss why so-called young people have been identified as interesting in the field in the first place, drawing attention, among other things, to their perceived innovativeness, in linguistic as well as cultural terms, their experimentation with existing social arrangements, and, not least, their relative accessibility for research endeavours. The chapter will argue that this interest has translated into sociolinguistic approaches which have focused on young people to explain language change, to descriptions of innovative youthful varieties, and to approaches which have attended to language in interaction to demonstrate the linguistic production of youthful identities, before addressing the types of analysis that have been adopted in these approaches. Against this backdrop, the chapter identifies what contributions these approaches have made to the understanding of language and youth culture and indicate remaining issues and debate.
