it's like yeah she's kuhMURN

So I'm sitting on a train down to London and the only space available puts me among three teenage girls who have boarded somewhere further north. It is impossible not to hear their conversation. One of them, especially, is loud.

As well as peppering every sentence with the word 'like' (often pronounced approximately thus: luhrk), they have developed a peculiar drawl constructed from excessively prominent glottal stops and really strange vowel sounds. Much of what I hear is impossible to transcribe accurately. But here is an attempt to explain how several words sounded. Capital letters indicate an unusually heavy stress on a usually unstressed syllable. Rather than use phonetic symbols with which not every reader will be familiar, an attempt has been made to use common spellings that tend consistently to convey the same sounds in British English (RP variant). The one exception is the use of the symbol ʔ to represent the glottal stop.

Some of what I heard:

kitchen = kiʔCHURN

little bit = liʔurl BUHR

girl = gahrl

marathon = maraTHURN

nothing = nuhFURN

coming = kuhMUHRN

In general, it was striking that the last syllable of any given utterance was unusually extended and over-emphasised. Is this particular element now a feature of youthful, seemingly-confident speech generally? I'm sure I've heard it in the voice-overs of adverts for products aimed at young people.

It wasn't especially hard to tune into (i.e. understand), but it was exceptionally unpleasant to hear. I can only describe the effect created as being to convey the impression that the speaker is displaying a peculiar personality composed of laziness, boredom, arrogance, mockery and apparent over-confidence (but really  excessive self-consciousness). Somewhere along the line, a trend-setter among these youngsters has displayed some of these speech characteristics and then been aped by her friends. Over time, I'd guess, these features become more and more exaggerated as it steadily becomes impossible to fit into the group without sounding like this. But to an outsider, of course, it sounds really odd.

It seemed clear that these kids were the offspring of comfortable middle-class families. So this curious microlect they are constructing is not the supposedly slovenly speech of youngsters that some would deride as 'chavs'. It is to be hoped that they can switch out of this way of speaking when needed. It wouldn't serve them well in the workplace.