The American teenage girl is the most powerful influence on the English language around the world, according to a research recently published. 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 new phrases.
Sali Tagliamonte, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto, claims that young women in Britain as well as North America are years ahead of young men in adopting new words.
She says the strongest recent shift has been the spread of Californian Valley Girl style, promoted around by the globe tv shows.
This style of speech is characterised by inserting words such as " like" and "so" to add emphasis to a sentence. " Girls are the single most powerful source in the English language today", she says.
Her findings will be discussedby the American Dialect Society, whose academic membership voted for the word or phrase of the year.
The winner was "truthiness" (...). It was agreed however, that the most useful word was "podcast" - a web feed of audio or video files that can be downloaded from the internet. Other words, created by young women, included chickenhead ( an ugly girl), creepin' and falsin' ( cheating and lying in a relationship).
