My Idiolect

Explore how and why your own language varies in different contexts and consider how others react to your speech. During the 14 years of my life, I have learnt to adjust and familiarise my dialect to suit diverse situations through the impact of media, family, music and social networking. Moreover, I have come to pay special attention to the context of where someone is talking and the mode of how they are communicating. I have also gained the awareness of how others respond to features of my idiolect and what to anticipate of them if I alter it.
One aspect that stands out to be the utmost dominant in the means of varying my idiolect is social networking. Abbreviations like “LOL” and “ROFL” appear to be making their way into everyday teenager dialects around the world including mine. I have noticed that I currently use “LOL” often to let others recognise when I find something humorous. What I perceive from this is that I only use this abbreviation around my friends primarily because of the formal and informal parting of my idiolect between my friends and people like my teachers and parents.
I think I do this because I consider using informal words with an audience I’m generally formal with, strange and unfamiliar. I also believe I do this because I expect an audience of that kind to object to it since teenage slang is most frequently thought as discourteous and lethargic. Music also impacts my idiolect as I am so exposed to it that it has come to be typical for me to pick up a few words and slang from certain lyrics. One example of how music has influenced me is a simple conversation between me and my sister in which she said: “You lost my earrings didn’t you? and I answered with “Oh whatever, YOLO! ” The origin of this acronym came from the Canadian rapper, Drake’s bonus track from his album ‘Take care’. It has since been popularized all over the world and people have now started using this term to define when someone is about to do something idiotic. I used this word because I knew my sister would be acquainted with it since the majority of teenagers have basic understanding of slang and abbreviations being used at the moment.

I regularly speak to my mother in a more official and basic way thus the variation in spoken language between my sister and my mother is due to me wanting to adapt to the way my friends and the younger generation of my family use the aspects of music to express their feelings. I also used “YOLO” to strengthen the connection between me and my sister so that she would know that we have a lot of things in common in terms of understanding general teenage knowledge.
I do not use slang when conversing with my parents because I know that they will criticize this way of communicating as most parents believe slang makes teenagers sound unintelligent and incompetent including mine. My parents think I should use try to use Standard English in everyday life as practice for when I do specific English exams. They also consider that media in terms of TV shows and the dialectal manner of celebrities have triggered an adverse effect on people my age because they believe that the poor grammar of people from this region is promoted to sound cool and trendy.
My parents have confidence in the idea that my vocal language has been substituted with words like “Totes” and “amazeballs”. Nevertheless when I indicate to them that I have adapted to using proper and apparently ‘posh’ words from classical books, my parents react positively and praise the use of my language. This goes to show that certain factors have certain outcomes to the way a person speaks and how a person responds to this.