How Australia’s kids are changing the English language

WE all know kids today talk differently. Turns out what they write is also changing. The words five to seven-year-olds like most and prefer to shorten have been revealed.

THE words Victorian children write are changing, with “computer”, “versus” and “guys” no longer in popular use by five to seven-year-olds.

A study comparing the words written by boys and girls between 2007 and 2017 shows children’s writing is getting more informal, with “mum” replacing “mother”, “hi” replacing “hello” and “vs.” replacing “versus”.

The Flinders University study of 3218 writing samples from 1000 boys and girls also shows prep or foundation children are writing less words on average.

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The Oxford Wordlist study, led by education researcher Anne Bayetto, also finds children are increasingly using colourful adjectives such as “super”, “awesome”, “amazing” and “crazy”.

A gender divide is also apparent in the writing of the South Australian and Victorian five to seven-year-olds.

Words used by today’s children, like Ivy and Quade, are changing. Picture: Alex Coppel

Girls were more likely to use words such as “princess”, “girl”, “castle”, “rainbow”, “unicorn” and “grandma”, while boys wrote more about sport and adventure, with “ninja”, “soccer” and “football” commonly used.

Girls and boys even wrote about different animals, with girls choosing domestic “cats”, “bunny” and “dogs” while boys preferred to write about wild animals such as “sharks”, “snakes” and “monkeys”.

Mrs Bayetto said: “The intention has been to record and analyse words that students spontaneously chose to write and to consider whether there were shared indicators and trends in relation to how students perceive their identities and lived experiences.

“The words students learn and choose to speak and write are influenced by the amount and quality of spoken language in their home, social contexts, childcare, preschool and school.

“Inherent knowledge of high frequency words supports students to become more independent so that they can focus their attention on dealing with low frequency words.

“From the choice of proper nouns, it appears that many of the gender words likely evolve from out-of-school lifestyle — from their toys, television and movies watched.”

Word choices were collected through teachers photocopying students independent writing samples on different days of the week so they could gather a wider range of word usage beyond the common Monday exercise of students writing a story about what happened on the weekend.

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Originally published as How Australia’s kids are changing the English language