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Gender, generation and politics
6.2.1
Regional differences
Another argument against the notion of a fairly homogeneous Jugendsprache is major regional (as well as national) variation. On the basis of attitudinal interviews, linguistic analysis and questionnaires on language use and perceptions among young people in Bern, Vienna, Munich, rural Upper Bavaria, Leipzig, the Ruhr and Hamburg, Ehmann (1992) deduces some major differences in the nature and origins of youth register in different parts of the German-speaking area. North Germans and, to a much lesser extent, the others use youth register in response to group pressure and in protest against conventions. Upper Bavarians tend to do so for the fun of it. In the areas where dialect is strong (Switzerland, Austria, and Bavaria), it provides much of the basis for the in-group youth register, which is not as marked. In North Germany, youth register draws more on anglicisms and expressions from other sub-cultural registers (e.g. drug scene, disco, Spontis).The Upper Bavarians and the East Germans are those least affected by the media. Historical factors are obviously the reason why the East Germans' youth register is less influenced by English than that of the other young people. The influence of the language of comics and, to a lesser extent, youth magazines is much greater in the cities than on the land, where the young people consider their usage to be more creative and less derivative. Music has had a crucial input into the registers of young people, especially since the New Wave of the 1980s has shaken both musical and linguistic conventions in depicting dissonance and monotony. This has included the Austrian groups Falco and D6F, the Swiss Grauzone, and the German groups Trio, Nena and Ideal (Ehmann 1992: 80). But there are also major differences between Austria/Bavaria, North Germany and Switzerland. There are different kinds of preferences for pop music. In Bavaria and Austria, the Austrian singers Georg Danzer and Rainhard Fenderich and Austro-Pop groups such as Erste Allgemeine Versicherung are the examples for youth register (although Danzer satirizes Alternativsprache which has become sterile with cliches such as Kommunikationsebene, Problem, Selbsterfahrungsgruppe, Selbstverwirklichung, in his song Total
(Ehmann 1992: 83—6). Bands such as BAP in Cologne, using a mixture of dialect and Jugendsprache, also exist in the North, but Ehmann's survey suggests that in the northern part of Germany, English-language pop music is more significant than elsewhere. He also indicates that media influence on the youth register is strongest in the cities and that is where the 'group markers' are most pronounced. Using interviews, Beneke (1993) shows that there are still differences