I love listening to teenagers talk in languages not my own. I’m not talking about typical teenage slang, I’m talking about actual other languages, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish. There is a depth of expression that teens use in any culture, particularly when they are long, a greater range of inflection, they change their voices to mimic or mock. Their body language reflects the depth and breadth of what they are saying in a way that adults for the most part seem to have lost. Adults tend to use speech to convey information, they don’t seem to take as much joy in their voices as the young do, or perhaps they have already burned through that phase of existence and found it wanting. Sure, you might hear the occasion shout of joy at meeting a long lost friends, or a loud laugh here and there, but the manipulation is far far less. I have not heard, in my lifetime, more than a dozen different languages and dialects spoken, so i can’t really say if this is a
cultural issue, that grownups in general tend to become more efficient, to tone it down as they get older in some places in the world but not others.

Sent from the iPad I swiped from DrSpaus