Women lead language evolution by picking up new words, phrases(23603)-英语教育-(33)-21英语网

本文作者： 21ST

　　最新研究表明，英美国家的青少年尤其是女性经常使用的“时髦”语言对英语的发展正起到十分重要的作用。随着时尚潮流的演变，由青少年创造的新词汇不断丰富着英语语汇。同时，研究还发现，女性比男性更善于使用新潮语言。　　US teens is the most powerful influence on the evolution of the English language around the world, a recently published academic study shows. 　　According to The Sunday Times, Sali Tagliamonte, associate professor of Linguistics at the University of Toronto, Canada, said that teenage girls in the US as well as Britain are years ahead of their male counterparts in adopting new words and phrases. The typical 16-year-old girl, armed with a mobile phone, a wide circle of friends and a keen fashion sense, has ensured the success of many new words and phrases. 　　"One of the most pervasive findings of sociolinguistics is that when you have language changing, women tend to lead the change. They pick up the new form and they carry it forward probably about a generation ahead of the guys," said Tagliamonte, author of the research. 　　Tagliamonte found that teens, particularly girls, tended to frequently use words such as "like" "just" and "so" in their conversations, for example, "That is so, like, not true." This style of speech is characterized by inserting these drawled words to add emphasis to a sentence, which rises in pitch at the end. Tagliamonte said the strongest recent shift has been promoted around the globe by characters from television shows. 　　Wayne Glowka, Chairman of American Dialect Society (ADS) New Words Committee, said girls used new or fashionable words as status symbols, forcing the constant evolution of the language as fashions changed. 　　According to The Australian, Ellen Grote, a researcher at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, has studied how Aboriginal teenage girls borrowed words from other cultures in their email gossip to construct a communal identity. 　　"They would recruit words that appear in American hip hop music. That was one way they would build their own identity," she said. 　　Linguists believe that women seeking prestige pick up fashionable new words faster than men. This has been going on for centuries. A Finnish study of 15th-Century English court correspondence shows that aristocratic wives moved from archaic "ye" to "you" significantly earlier than their husbands. 　　

New words used by US teens

　　prositot: a child dressed as a pop star
　　squares: cigarettes
　　chickenhead: an unattractive woman
　　muffin top: a bulge of flesh over low-cut jeans
　　exogal: an extremely thin contemporary
　　whale tail: the appearance of thong underwear above the waistband of a pair of low-slung jeans or a skirt