Adolescent linguistic practice as teen years’ acquisition

Abstract This chapter explores language learning as it continues through adolescence, suggesting that “acquisition” never stops, even for an individual’s childhood language(s). Insights from sociolinguistic variation, phonological acquisition, and articulatory phonetics are presented, with a focus on later childhood through the teen years. Drawing from both sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological traditions, language is understood as a social practice rather than primarily a cognitive and structural paradigm. In this view, the daily practice of using and understanding a system characterized by categorical variability, as scholarship in phonetics and phonology has so thoroughly studied, invites continuous innovation. The vowel space is used as an extended example of sociophonetic innovation that draws on a learned system of categorical variability. This productive creativity of variable forms is explored here as continued language learning throughout the teen years.