A Sociopragmatic Analysis of Wakamono Kotoba in TikTok Content Themed on Teenage Life (2025–2026 Period)

Abstract

Abstract

TikTok's prevalence as a primary communication platform among Japanese youth accelerates the development of wakamono kotoba (若者言葉). This study aims to describe linguistic forms of wakamono kotoba, analyze implicit meaning via Grice's (1975) implicature theory, and describe Gricean maxim violations in TikTok videos with youth life themes during 2025–2026. A qualitative sociopragmatic approach was employed with 11 utterances collected from six public TikTok accounts of Japanese youths aged 13–25. Five formation processes (clipping, reduplication, nominalization, informal adjective formation, semantic shift), four implicature patterns (humor and irony, emotional intensification, personal information management, social evaluation), and dominant manner violations (6 data) were found. This study concludes that wakamono kotoba on TikTok functions as a complex pragmatic strategy producing implicit meaning through maxim violations, not merely lexical variation.

Keywords: wakamono kotoba, TikTok, implicature, Gricean maxims, sociopragmatics