This volume sets out to foreground the issues of youth identity in the context of current sociolinguistic and discourse research on identity construction. Based on detailed empirical analyses, the twelve chapters offer examinations of how youth identities from late childhood up to early twenties are locally constructed in text and talk. The settings and types of social organization investigated range from private letters to graffiti, from peer group talk to video clips, from schoolyard to prison. Comparably, a wide range of languages is brought into focus, including Danish, German, Greek, Japanese, and Turkish. Drawing on various discourse analytic paradigms (e.g. Critical Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis), the contributions examine and question notions with currency in the field, such as young people's linguistic creativity and resistance to mainstream norms. At the same time, they demonstrate the embeddedness of constructions of youth identities in local activities and communities of practice where they interact with other social identities and factors, in particular gender and ethnicity.

Examining how diverse social identities are constructed in digital communication in China, this edited collection provides a multidimensional exploration of the diverse, discursive forms and practices used to construct and present the “self” online. Contributing authors provide analyses of China’s digital communication platforms, such as social media platforms, news websites and short video applications, drawing from a wealth of data to study daily practices of digital performance of identity and maintenance of social bonds. Comprised of nine chapters, this essential volume is divided into three distinct sections, taking a hierarchical approach to analysing social identities within Chinese digital communication at the micro, meso and macro levels. Diverse methodologies are applied throughout, incorporating insights from both linguistic theories and semiotic or textually oriented analyses, while also considering the wider societal contexts. Readers are encouraged to analyse the main features of this digital culture and to investigate how language and discourse are encountered through media. This book will be of value to a wide variety of scholars and students in sociolinguistics, communication studies and Asian studies.

Based on approaches from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, this study proposes an analytical model focusing on the linguistic and discursive means narrators use to construct a variety of identities in everyday stories. This model is further exploited in language teaching to cultivate students' cultural sensitivity and critical literacy.

This book offers a close look at the discourse of and around three socially marginalised and vulnerable groups – Irish Travellers, Squatters and Homeless people – in order to understand more about how individuals within them position themselves vis-à-vis mainstream society. It investigates the groups' diverse and provisional relationship with space that challenges mainstream society's spatial logic. Given that the relationship between mobility, space and identity has been explored in migrant contexts, Roberta Piazza proposes a reconsideration of this relationship beyond people's movement from one place to another. Investigating the space-identity nexus among the three groups, she highlights how mobility is not solely a cross-country phenomenon, but a no-less crucial and dramatic reality within an individual nation. Based on close linguistic analysis of interviews collected over many years, Piazza investigates how the participants construct their social and personal identities when talking about themselves and the sites they inhabit, drawing on the concepts of 'heterotopia' and non-sexual desire.

This book examines language and identity among White American middle and upper-middle class youth who affiliate with Hip Hop culture. Hip Hop youth engage in practices that range from the consumption of rap music and fashion to practices like MC-ing (writing and performing raps or "rhymes"), DJ-ing (mixing records to produce a beat for the MC), graffiti tagging, and break-dancing. Cutler explores the way in which these young people stylize their speech using linguistic resources drawn from African American English and Hip Hop slang terms. She also looks at the way they construct their identities in discussions with their friends, and how they talk about and use language to construct themselves as authentic within Hip Hop. Cutler considers the possibility that young people experimenting with AAVE-styled speech may improve the status of AAVE in the broader society. She also addresses the need for educators to be aware of the linguistic patterns found in AAVE and Hip Hop language, and ways to build on Hip Hop skills like rhyming and rapping in order to motivate students and promote literacy.

Taking a critical, research-oriented perspective, this book explores the theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical connections between reading and teaching young adult literature in middle and secondary classrooms and adolescent identity development.

Introduction / Anna-Brita Stenström and Annette Myre Jörgensen -- Identity construction: On young women's prosodic construction of identity: evidence from Greek conversational narratives / Argiris Archakis and Dimitris Papazachariou -- Now he thinks he's listening to rock music: identity construction among German teenage girls / Janet Spreckels -- Multilingual practices and identity negotiations among Turkish-speaking young people in a diasporic context / Vally Lytra and Taskin Baraç -- Particular expressions: Lexical innovations in Madrid's teenage talk: some intensifiers / Juan A. Martínez López -- En plan used as a hedge in Spanish teenage language / Annette Myre Jörgensen -- Languages in contrast: a proposal for comparative research on youth language with an outline of diatopic-contrast research within the Hispanic world / Klaus Zimmermann -- Pragmatic markers in contrast: Spanish pues nada and English anyway / Anna-Brita Stenström -- Anglicisms in the informal speech of Norwegian and Chilean adolescents / Eli-Marie Drange -- Similarities and differences between slang in Kaunas and London teenagers' speech / Jolanta Legaudaite