Prepare for a dropped name. I once spoke to Johnny Ball *clang* and he was very opinionated and sensible on the subject of young people today.

What he said was that the different generations no longer speak to one another or share culture and experiences in the way that they did in the past and that this is a particular problem for the young. It makes many of them extremely confident to the point of arrogance in amongst their own peer groups, but monosyllabic, defensive and simply not confident amongst everyone else. Hence the culture of "respeck!" It's an exaggerated way of asserting authority that they don't actually have in their everyday life while emphasizing separateness and uniqueness . And it will get you nowhere in the end.

I think Emma T is saying something similar here. Speaking slang can emphasize the sense of belonging to the young, but it also emphasizes the distance from the people who will help you get on in life. Like any sensible middle class person (or even typical word blogger), when I hear the jafakin' youths of London and feel only pity tinged with slight contempt. If you remain trapped within that pattern of language you can never progress in life, even if speaking like that can perhaps protect you when you are young.

...I wouldn't mind betting it was less about slang than the replacement of verbs and nouns with expressions like "kinda" and "like".

Try this. Sit in a public place, say on the top deck of a bus or a Starbucks, close your eyes, listen to the flow of general conversation and just focus on the word "like". I guarantee you'll be staggered by how much of our speech is just that one word.

I don't see how you can argue in favour of "articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power" and then demand people refrain from using certain words!

What sort of slang are we talking about here anyway? Geek? Rock 'n'Roll? Cool? Teenager? Hangover?

Surely the point is that youth speak to each other in a certain way which supports their culture and norms (as did I as a spotty oik in Macclesfield in the 70s), but ought to know how to speak "properly" for when they need to communicate outside that group. There's nothing wrong with speaking a quasi dialect or code as long as it is a conscious decision and not a basic inability to talk in any other way. My nipper talks like a North Herts herbert to his friends, dropping aitches, YYW etc, but can speak perfectly correctly with his "may I" and "please/thank you" perfectly in place when the situation calls for it.

Not only does language evolve with new words and phrases, but with how the language is used. Some of the changes stay within one particular group, some last for a bit then disappear and some go mainstream and become widely used.

and go down the tubes at the same time; particularly if it's fashionable to use a word to mean more or less its opposite. See 'bad', 'wicked', 'sick', etc.

And so bifel it that this kyng Arthour
Hadde in his hous a lusty bacheler,
890 That on a day cam ridynge fro ryver;
And happed that, allone as she was born,
He saugh a mayde walkynge hym biforn,
Of whiche mayde anon, maugree hir heed,
By verray force he rafte hir maydenhed;

Not for the first time, I find myself asking What Would Chaucer Do?

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
5
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra

*sighs* They just don't write Anglo-Saxon like they used to...

I was listening to the Radiolab podcast yesterday, and they were talking about the huge number of words and phrases introduced to the English language by Shakespeare - elbow room, sea change, ladybird, eyeball, addiction, well-bred, unsolicited, ill-tempered, cold comfort, skim milk, and hundreds more. I wonder if people at the time were resistant to this?

Language is power.

There's a balance to be struck between allowing for a natural evolution of language and letting people actively disenfranchise themselves.

Of course language evolves, but I think this might be one of the first generations of young people where the ability to speak in a range of different registers might be at risk. The middle class kids are probably alright - we might snort contemptuously at terribly nice children from Hertfordshire talking like Omar from The Wire, but at least they have an option: when they're in interviews, in exams and so on, they know how to express themselves in standard English.

But many of the kids I see honestly don't know how to switch out of their yoofspeak. It's the only language they speak. And that's really disempowering.

Emma Thompson says ! Whilst she makes a very valid point, it concerns me more how adults mangle and abuse language - just listen to public announcements, some radio announcers and the double-speak used by corporates. I'm not too concerned about teenagers, they will grow out of it. However it does seem that some foreigners use English better than we do, just listen to Scandinavians and Dutch speaking English - puts us to shame.

Of course different groups of people use different slang, jargon and expressions. Apart from anything else, it's a way of asserting group identity (which touches on matters of belonging and values) and keeping outsiders in the dark. People have been doing it all over the world for centuries.

The issue seems to me to be whether people have the intelligence and the articulacy (or even the desire) to be able to adapt their speech to be able to communicate clearly and unambiguously with wider society. If not, they are likely to remain stuck within that smaller group - whether they're an unemployed yooth or a super-bright geek who only talks in quarks.

Words are the building blocks of communication. They carry concepts with specific meanings and it's a common understanding of these meanings that enable us to communicate meaningfully with each other. There's nothing wrong with playing on these rules or evolving the way we use them but succesful communication is built on shared language.

She's of the school of trying to let on she's desperately 'normal', while in fact she lives a very rarified life and is always lecturing on what people shouild and shouldn't do.

I find her willfully eccentric mother grating too.

Can I just say that I really fancy her?

Carry on.

The concept of High German and Low German and how they interact? Is this relevant to the way spoken English has become?

And what about the death of the tortured Posh Accent? BoJo is one of the last high-profile types to use a proper drawing-room drawl, not there in his public-school / Oxbridge contemporaries. The younger members of the Royal Family now all sound like generic public schoolboys.

'Sweow bad, innit? 'Ay shood tork loike proppah toffs. (As the Pompey vernacular might have it)

The whole point of talking and writing (unless you start "Dear Diary") is to communicate. If you fail to adjust to your target audience then all or part of your message may be missed. This can will happen with a posh person talking down to teenagers who may think "posh git" and just switch off. If someone talks to me with that odd inflection at the end of the sentence I will tend to miss half of what they say because I find it irritating and condescending which, although probably more my fault than theirs, still lessens the impact of what they are trying to get across. Writing has similar parameters, if you poorly punctuate a sentence (which I've probably already done!) you can end up having the reader stumble through and not garner the intended message.

I have no problem with the use of words that don't come easily to me (I'm 54 you know), as I remember developing a language between friends at school. A freehead was a music fan who liked the 'right' sort of music whereas a bollohead was the opposite. Surely high power business people have done exactly the same with their 'run it up the flagpole', 'take a helicopter view' etc however, what I can't stomach is the false West Indian accent applied to yoof speak. It makes me laugh rather than angry or sad. Language moves on, it's just that at my advanced age, I choose not to use the new words as anybody older then 18 sounds daft using it.

That some kids have retreated behind a barricade of their own language because they don't feel part of wider society as a whole. As a nation, we are quick to have a go at youth, but slow to embrace them. Media often portray the young in a negative light but rarely champion them.
The Brits have a long standing reputation as a nation that thinks more of it's pets than it's children.

I like because I can understand what they are getting across which helps me respond to them. A conversation, by its very nature, requires people to understand each other. So people should be able to moderate and change their approach and vocabulary depending on who they talking with. I swear a lot more when I play football than I do in job interviews for example (and I never, ever came close to having a job interview that related to football either).

I think I come out on the the side of the fragrant Ms. Thompson because of the inarticulate nature of the constant repetition of words that has come into common use. They simply add nothing to a conversation. If only people would slow down and think about what they are trying to say, it would be so much better.

Well, skimmed it really. She mentions this issue while plugging an update of My Fair Lady she is working on - and that made me think if Shaw was writing a play about it 100 years ago, it's perhaps a bit unfair to say it's new. Also she thinks you should speak properly "Or you're going to sound like a knob." But hang on she's just used slang, so she sounds like a...

Possibly she was being ironic, but equally possibly not.

"There is the necessity to have two languages - one that you use with your mates and the other that you need in any official capacity."

I don't that that's out of touch at all. Speak the right way for the right time - don't speak in the job interview the way you would to your mates. And don't speak to your mates like you're making a formal speech. If you do, as she says, "you'll sound like a knob"

Another source here :
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/8028391/Actress-Emma-Thompson-at...

Elvis Costello always comes across in interviews and on stage as being particularly articulate and extremely intelligent yet took years to get over foolish bar talk which I assume was out of character.
I can swear like a trooper and hold an intelligent conversation with the best of them - I don't consider these 'talents' to irreconcilable.
Mind you I agree with Mr Hepworth she is crumpet!!

But I've met some people, mostly young, who just can't and there seems to be more of them. That's the problem in a nutshell I guess.

I also love Emma Thompson. Mrs Ganglesprocket has permitted me to place her on my "allowed" list. I hear Greg Wise is crapping himself.

Well, one who is and the other one who nearly is.

Part of the way they talk with their friends is to begin to assert their differentness from us as their parents - some of it spills over in the way they talk to us - not much Jamaican slang in rural Northumberland mind. They're occasionally very truculent though aren't we all.

None of it necessarily implies anything about their ability to communicate or their happiness or otherwise.

However if they were still talking like that in their early twenties, staring at the ground and muttering, occasionally glaring, rolling their eyes in exasperation at innocuous comments, and showing an almost pathological aversion to work - much as I love them and really enjoy their company I probably wouldn't employ them!

is with people adopting the teen phrases when it makes them sound ridiculous.
Example?
A bloke in my office is exceedingly well spoken, lives in a cottage in Kent, doesn't glottal stop and takes time to ensure his sentences are correct.
So why does he, in all seriousness, use 'my bad' when he has made a mistake. Preposterous. I think there is a bit of another thread seeping in, it makes us feel old. But we were all using slang of one sort or another.
And remember, it doesn't just apply to kids. My dad was in the navy and every concrete noun had a slang term. We used some of them at my naval boarding school too and so it was a mixture of these naval terms and our own slang.
I love hearing the words that infiltrate the language and subvert standard meanings. Whoever uses them just needs to remember there is a time and a place. It's the British equivalent of the French tu and vous.

I said he sounds ridiculous, and he does. Like when a politician uses the word cool or pretends to like Arctic Monkeys. He can say what he pleases, in my opinion he sounds 'like a lame-o' that's all.

In the same interview she said that she was in the happy position of never having to work again, and she wished that more people could experience that.
It's a lovely thought isn't it? Expressed in immaculate Cambridge-educated English.
I think Emma should be Prime Minister - she'd get it all sorted out.

Wasn't there a joke about her, in the distant past,in which she asks Kenneth Brannagh his whereabouts, to be answered "In the bathroom, darling", "Can I be in it too? was the response.

It's not just the spoken word. It grinds my gears when someone uses the construction "could of" instead of "could have". It's bad enough when spoken but when written it's shocking. See the subject header and see if that annoys you.

What concerns me, as a grammar facist, is that things such as this aren't picked up by Word (not this august journal... you know the one I mean) spell checker. I have seen innumerable examples in documents and emails that have gone to customers. It's especially prevalent amongst graduate recruits.

I don't think snobbery provides the motivation for Ms Thompson's comments (and even it it did, she'd still have a point).
If you don't have mastery of the language, you won't be able to express complex ideas and emotions. That makes you, somehow, a less rich human being.

A couple of years ago, I bought my dad a book commemorating one hundred years of the Daily Record (a popular Scottish newspaper, the local equivalent of the Daily Mirror). The book reproduced front page stories from many of the big news events of the era - the moon landing, the Kennedy assasination, Celtic winning the European Cup etc.

The degeneration in the standards of grammar and language from even fifty years ago is quite staggering. There is no doubt that the ordinary working person from, say, 1959 would have been accustomed, in his or her everyday reading, to encountering a degree of sophistication that would flummox the 'average' reader today.

We might agree or disagree as to whether that is a good or a bad thing, but it's definitely a thing that has already happened, is still happening and, I'm afraid, shows no sign of slowing down.

although how you speak isn't necessarily down just to your social class there are other things going on like the link between technology and speech it would be interesting to do a study for example on the relationship between text language and spoken English

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11642588