Anastasia G. Stamou, Anastasia Agrafioti & Konstantinos D. Dinas. 2012. Representations of youth (language) in Greek TV commercials. Journal of Youth Studies, 15:7, 909-928

Drawing upon evidence from Greek TV commercials, we explore how youth language is mediated and what the ideological role of such depictions is regarding young people as a social group and the speech styles they employ. Given the fact that consumption is a major index of late modern (youth) identities, the way young people and their speech styles are represented in advertising has important implications for the identification process of young people and those who feel young. The analysis is made with the use of an analytical framework developed for the mediation of sociolinguistic reality in mass cultural texts (Stamou 2011). It consists of four components (a ‘linguistic’, a ‘sociolinguistic’, a ‘semiotic’, and an ‘ideological’ one) and is premised upon the framework by Coupland (2007) on ‘style’. In the TV commercials analyzed, one could easily detect the dominant constructions of youth as a homogeneous social and cultural experience, framed in contrast to adulthood. Consequently, although the particular TV commercials are supposed to be about and for young people, being produced by (adult) advertisers, they do not escape from perpetuating, albeit often implicitly, the dominant construction of youth as incomplete adulthood.