Teenage Subculture

Music, Fashion, and Language in the Teenage Subculture

Within the teenage subculture exists social norms not quite different from the other age groups. These social norms include behavioral patterns, accepted beliefs, and attitudes influenced through their social context, that is, the teenagers’ environment. Members of the teenage group tend to seek out peers with behaviors and values similar to them and are highly receptive to outside influence. Their experiences regarding the information teenagers gain help shape their understanding of normative behavior thus training them in social relations and growth.

This paper will deal with three cultural factors that influence and are influenced by the teenage group namely, music, fashion, and language.

Teenagers have long been preoccupied with the clothes they wear since it is part of the adolescence experience to be concerned with what constitutes being "cool." Status is important to adolescents because they have so little economic or political power. In earlier times, fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds were often considered adults, sometimes with their own jobs and families. In contrast, today 's high school students have little control over the basic structure of their lives. Teenagers do, however, have one crucial kind of power: the power to create an informal social world in which they evaluate one another. That is, they can and do create their own status systems—usually based on criteria quite different from those promoted by parents or teachers. Predictably, their status in the eyes of their peers becomes very important in their day-to-day lives. So in order to gain status in any group, members must conform to its

Linguistic choices are affected by a host of factors, including their communicative intentions and the context in which communication occurs. The challenge lies in identifying the conditions under which speakers elect one or another verb type to describe their experiences. A study found out that when asked to talk about their school and familial experiences, children and adults tend to compare the verb types used in sentence segments that had "myself" or "other people" as their subjects. More state verbs and fewer action verbs were used when the self was described than when other people were described, suggesting that individuals may tend to think of their own experiences in terms of concrete actions, and to think and communicate about others ' experiences more abstractly, in terms of general dispositions. This shows that quite independently of what we say, our speech tells others a great deal about us: our age, gender, geographic origin, socioeconomic status, and even our size. Another norm that exists are gender-specific vocal cues. Vocal cues to gender are partly phonetic, a consequence of differences in male and female vocal tracts, and partly matters of social norms: in some settings women and men are expected to employ different speech styles reflected in differences in syntax, pronunciation and vocabulary. Especially considering the puberty stage of