Subculture Assignment

I have been having trouble thinking of a subculture and what makes it a subculture but then I stumbled upon this article by Steve Mizrach and it helped me a bit. Specifically the first three paragraphs

Over the past two years, the focus of my research has been focused on youth subcultures in American society. I have been interested in how these subcultures have come into being, and how they maintain their solidarity and cohesiveness. There has been a great deal of research into how these subcultures come into being through organizing around music (Polhemus 1994), fashion and style (Hebidge 1977), drugs (Redhead 1993), and countercultural norms and deviant practices at odds with 'straight' society (Ben-Yehuda 1990). While people have looked at some of the more unusual linguistic aspects of these groups (use of slang, anti-language, jargons, and 'hip talk'), there has been no real effort to look closely at language as a determinant of sociocultural identity. While there have been efforts to look at the interrelations between language, culture, and identity, most of the research in these areas has not looked into the process of language formation and the ways in which existing languages are altered to fit new roles, perceptions, and identities.Ever since Lee, Whorf, Berlin-Kay, et al., did their studies, it has been commonplace to assert that language shapes ones' cultural worldview and thus how they experience the world. However, such analyses have often been static. A culture's language is assumed to be derived from unmediated sensory input from their environment (hence the idea that the Esquimaux have about thirty words for snow, etc.), without any process of invention or creativity. However, what my research with these subcultures has shown is that there is a constant practice of innovation and experimentation involved in language. Further, these subcultures are aware that in rejecting existing linguistic practices, they are also challenging the norms and worldviews that they are supposed to undergird. Language is a realm of conflict , because worldviews are in collision, and irreconcilable differences may exist between the views of 'straight' society and that of the subcultures. Linguistic identity can be oppositional , reflecting what the person rejects and denies as part of their life.
This view of linguistic systems as being fundamentally exploratory and experimental is not new. In physical evolution, we can see throughout the fossil record evidence of organisms trying and 'probing' different developmental pathways through multiple genetic 'drift'. Cognitive science also shows us that the brain, in planning decisions, often runs through scenarios and possibilities, arriving at outcomes through processes of elimination. Language, I suggest, works the same way. Conservative linguists who seek to conserve the propriety of their respective languages, preserving some sort of official canon of standards, misunderstand fundamentally the way in which language works in human cultures. Linguistic innovation is a way of testing 'pathways of development' for linguistic systems, attempting to find vectors which may meet future cultural demands and point the way to new directions of social change. It is a process that has been particularly accelerated by new communications technologies which propagate such innovations all the more rapidly.

Here is the link for the whole article http://www2.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/subcultural-discourse.html