Why do young women, especially teenagers, use the word "like" so often in conversation?

Question

I overheard a young female co-worker use that word repeatedly while talking the other day and it about drove me nuts!
"I was like...it was like...she was like..." Over and over till my ears about exploded!!
Why do young women speak this way?

Not all young women, but many.

Answer 1

Its a lack of sufficient vocabulary, most annoying. Assembling a complete sentence seems to increase with age, they'll get over it. Use of F word in every sentence among young men is even more scary. TV writers are the culprits, if kids hear the F word on TV they think its OK.

Answer 2

I actually read an article about this last year. It started out as a very "Valley girl" snobbish way of speaking and gradually spread to other groups. Now, almost all teens and a large amount of adults (under the age of 40) use the the word "like" in this context. Not only that, but it's spread to most of the other english speaking countries in the world.

It's a really interesting article, I highly reccomend reading it.

Answer 3

Not because of lack of vocabulary! These are examples of a type of word or expression called "discourse markers," which are a little hard to define, but which "do not contribute to the propositional meaning of a sentence but do contribute to the interpretation." The discourse marker "like" can serve many functions, including placing focus on an idea, setting off a quote from other spoken discourse, etc. Believe it or not, many scholarly articles have been written by respected linguists on *exactly* this same question. here are just a few I plucked from LLBA in about four minutes:

Schourop, L. 1985. Common discourse particles in English conversation: Like, Well, Y'know. Garland.

Tagliamonte, S., & D'Arcy, A. (2004). He's like, she's like: The quotative system in Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8(4), 493-514.

Adolphs, S., & Carter, R. (2003). And she's like it's terrible, like: Spoken discourse, grammar and corpus analysis. International Journal of English Studies, 3(1), 45-56.

Andersen, G. (1998). The pragmatic marker 'like' from a relevance-theoretic perspective. In A. H. Jucker, & Y. Ziv (Eds.), Discourse markers: Descriptions and theory (pp. 147-170).

Macaulay, R. (2001). You're like 'why not?' the quotative expressions of Glasgow adolescents. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(1), 3-21.

Romaine, S., & Lange, D. (1991). The use of 'like' as a marker of reported speech and thought: A case of grammaticalization in progress. American Speech, 66(3), 227-279.

Andersen, G. (1997). They like wanna see like how we talk and all that. The use of 'like' as a discourse marker in London teenage speech. In M. Ljung (Ed.), Corpus-based studies in English: Papers from the seventeenth international conference on English language research on computerized corpora

Fuller, J. M. (2003). Use of the discourse marker 'like' in interviews. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7(3), 365-377.

Hasund, I. K. (2004). The discourse markers ' like in English and 'liksom' in Norwegian teenage language: A corpus-based, cross-linguistic study.

Jucker, A. H., & Smith, S. W. (1998). And people just you know like 'wow': Discourse markers as negotiating strategies.
Maschler, Y. (2001). Veke'ilu haraglayim sh'xa nitka'ot bifnim kaze ('and like your feet get stuck inside like'): Hebrew kaze ('like'), ke'ilu ('like'), and the decline of Israeli dugri ('direct') speech. Discourse Studies, 3(3), 295-326

Siegel, M. E. A. (2002). Like: The discourse particle and semantics. Journal of Semantics, 19(1), 35-71

Answer 4

mind-blowing expression, superb use of the be conscious and an exceedingly humorous television application which owing to over comfortable laptop rulebooks - we can't in any respect see the likes of back. I shall placed the be conscious in six inch severe everlasting marker on the wall and intend to apply it daily... There we pass, this is up there precise next to "gobbledeshite!"

Answer 5

To make others like them. May B.

Answer 6

It's like it's stuck in your head or something and like it just comes natural to say once you've like used it so often. Also it's like a word that they like use to say because their vocabulary may not be so developed so they say "like" to just say any word and then you know its a work like that word...

Answer 7

when people use the words "like" or say "ummm" it is because of a few reasons:
1. speaking faster then thinking
2. lose for words
3. nervous
4. not comfortable

Answer 8

It's called lack of vocabulary...They use the same word every time they don't know the proper word they need to use

Answer 9

They use it when they are trying to explain something and its hard for them to get their point across so they use "like" to kind of buy them time to think!!

Answer 10

Because like you would like to express yourself like in a meaning like you can understand, like that it will go better on your brain........jOkinggggggggg.........I don't know, but i guess it just gets stuck, and is a way of expressing yourself ........