n. A dialect unique to teenagers.
2000
All you 'rents out there wondering what your teens are saying when they talk 24/7 about gettin' the 411 on babelicious hotties, totally fly threads and, like, celebs that are all that and a bag of chips?
They're speaking "pubilect" — a language found in teen magazines and high school classrooms across North America.
They're speaking "pubilect" — a language found in teen magazines and high school classrooms across North America.
1998
Marcel Danesi, a professor of linguistics and semiotics at the University of Toronto who has studied the language of youth and who coined the term "pubilect" to describe the dialect of pubescence, said he believes like is in fact altering the structure of the English language, making it more fluid in construction, more like Italian or some other Romance language than good old hard-and-fast Anglo-Saxon.
1994 (earliest)
Notwithstanding this conspicuous property of teen talk, most researchers continue to refer to it as slang. But, in my view, it is to be considered more of a social dialect, one which I prefer to call pubilect. Pubilect can, therefore, be de?ned simply as the social dialect of puberty.