The language of adolescents is a symptom, necessitating both psychical elaboration and the social and cultural inscription of symbolic practices. Linguistic practices cannot be reduced to the rupture of codes, but rather constitute a language of transit that speaks as much of the urgent need to communicate as of the even more imperious need to not be found, in order to confront the physical, psychical and social upheavals which animate them. Adolescent speech thus becomes a place where the desire of the subject can manage to say itself, outside of the mother tongue, and language may be conceived of as a metonymical representation of the gestating identity.

Adolescence, 2009, T. 27, n°4, pp. 959-970.