MCYS hosts visiting researcher

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From May 8th until May 26th, Nele Van Den Driessche is visiting the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies. She is a Belgian doctoral researcher who is currently carrying out a 5-year PhD-project. Her research project focuses on recent language change within Spanish teenage talk. She is particularly interested whether, and if so in which ways, the lexicon and syntax of Spanish teenage talk has changed in the 21st century and which social group is leading this change. Among her case studies, she investigates slang words, discourse markers and the use of English. A second big part of her research project is focused on the possible influence of the language of teenagers on other generations. To carry out het research project, she combines corpus data (one of the corpora has been created by her own research group, a project in which she was also involved), with experimental data obtained from surveys.

She is looking forward to see how the centre brings different research domains such as Linguistics, Sociology and Criminology, together and creates projects who give a voice to young people and have a positive impact on society and young peoples life. Additionally, since teenagers are the main interests of her research project, she is particularly interested to learn more about how to involve young people and motivate them to engage in scientific work.