So who? Like how? Just what?

In this paper I mine the rich resources of a large corpus of conversational data from young Canadians between 10 and 19 collected in 2002-2003 by participant observers from the same community. The spoken discourse of these speakers is replete with forms such as like, just, so, etc. as in I'm just like so happy'. What is the nature of these linguistic features? Where did they come from? How are they spreading and by whom? This pilot investigation reveals a concentration of these forms amongst the 15- to 16-year olds generally, and female speakers in particular. This result corroborates many other findings suggesting the tremendous influence of the peer group in the middle teenage years, the correlation of adolescence with dramatic linguistic differentiation and that females lead linguistic change. Further, despite the received wisdom, at least in the media, these features are not haphazard, random or indiscriminate. Instead, their patterns of use are quite circumscribed and linguistically defined. Indeed, their contrasting linguistic profiles viewed across different age cohorts (tweens, teens, and young adults) suggest that they are undergoing different types of change. More generally, the findings highlight the extent of linguistic innovation among young people in contemporary urban speech communities.