The mediation of ‘youth language’ in mainstream mass culture: evidence from a Greek family sitcom

Abstract

?y acknowledging the ideological framework upon which the media and mass culture operate, contemporary sociolinguistic research aims to explore how such texts shape viewers’ understanding about the speech of social groups and the way they eventually perpetuate or challenge certain social and linguistic stereotypes. In light of this, we examine the way ‘youth language’ is represented in a popular Greek family sitcom. As a product of late modern mass media, which tend to celebrate nonstandard, oral and conversational styles of talk, the TV series under analysis set out to familiarise a widely diversified TV audience with ‘youth language’. Hence, the construction of youth identity through the speech style teenage characters were depicted to employ was relatively favorable. Nevertheless, the TV series did not avoid perpetuating ?mostly through the visual images of young people it built? many of the stereotypes of the dominant discourse of adolescence. Eventually, this TV series contributes, even though in a subtle way, to the confirmation of established ideas about young people and their identity, and is in dialogue with relevant representations of youth detected in other mainstream mass media.