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"I dated this loser in high school and he was obsessed with lollies...and he'd just eat them. I'm just like: That's disgusting."

You don't need to have teenage children to recognise the speech patterns of young Australians in this second decade of the 21st century.

Rather than be affronted by them, Dr Celeste Rodriguez Louro, an Assistant Professor in Linguistics, is fascinated by the structure of vernacular Australian English.

"I love the way English is spoken in Australia," Professor Rodriguez Louro said. "I love the long drawn-out ‘yeah' that is so indicative of the laid-back Australian way."

Professor Rodriguez Louro is a sociolinguist. Sociolinguistics examines the relationship between language and society, including how linguistic and social factors such as age, education, social class, ethnicity and others influence language use and change.

One of the outstanding aspects of current youth language across varieties of English is the use of ‘like', known as ‘quotative be like' in the linguistics literature.

"There has been much published on ‘like' over the past 15 years or so, but Australian English deserves a closer look. I've conducted some research on the use of quotation in Perth English and I'm presenting my findings at a linguistics conference in Manchester in April this year," she said.

This research shows that - just as with other varieties of English around the world - the use of ‘like' usually starts with girls, around the age of 11 and continues well into the tertiary years, with boys ‘catching up' later in life.

"Women are leaders in language change in the western world," Professor Rodriguez Louro said. "Girls from 11 to 13 are very vigorous users of ‘like', while boys lag behind until they get to about university age, then they use it more than their female peers.

"My research shows that while young people are using ‘like' extremely often, it is rare to hear it used by somebody over the age of 35. The general consensus is that it started in the US, then spread via the mass media including to Canada, where it has been in use for a long time and has expanded and is now heard amongst people over 40."

She said that - much to the dislike of older generations - young people were bound to continue to use ‘like'.

"As with other aspects of language innovation, the expansion of ‘like' depends on it being evaluated positively. We will have to wait another 20 years to see whether ‘like' remains a strong contender as people age."

Professor Rodriguez Louro is also researching how verbs such as ‘think', ‘believe', ‘guess' and ‘reckon' are used to express one's attitude in Australian English. She hopes to study how these verbs were used from the 19th century onwards and how the system of Anglo Australian English compares to the uses of these verbs in Aboriginal Australian English.

Professor Rodriguez Louro says the widely used ‘yeah, no' expression in Australian English reflects the Australian preference for conflict avoidance. "As a cross-cultural observation, in my native Argentina, it is common to hear people respond with a blunt ‘no, no, no, no' before giving their opinion as a response to yours," she said.

"In countries such as Spain, Italy and France, expressing your opinion is valued and conflict is not avoided.

"Cross-cultural communication is ever important and we are lucky to be offering an exciting unit in second semester this year," she said.

The Linguistics discipline, in the School of Humanities, is offering a broadening unit this semester, Communication across Cultures and Languages. This new unit gives students an opportunity to learn about how language is used and understood in different cultural settings looking at, among many other areas, how silence is deployed by people from different cultures, inside and outside Australia.

"We are thrilled to be able to teach in this crucial area," she said.

Published in UWA News , 19 March 2012