THE American teenage girl is the most powerful influence on the English language around the world, according to research published last week.

The typical 16-year-old girl, armed with a mobile phone, a wide circle of friends and a keen fashion sense, has ensured the success of new phrases such as "muffin top" (a bulge of flesh over low-cut jeans) and "exogal" (an extremely thin contemporary).

Sali Tagliamonte, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto, claims that young women in Britain as well as North America are years ahead of young men in adopting new words, the Sunday Times of London said.

She says the strongest recent shift has been the spread of Californian Valley Girl style, promoted around the globe by television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The OC.

This style of speech is characterized by inserting drawled words such as "like" and "so" to add emphasis to a sentence, which rises in pitch at the end.

"Valley Girl has gone beyond a fad and is now rooted in different forms of English around the world," Tagliamonte said. "Girls are the single most powerful force in the English language today."

Her findings were discussed over the weekend by the American Dialect Society, whose academic membership voted for the word or phrase of the year.

The winner was "truthiness" - defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than facts. It was agreed, however,that the most useful word was "podcast" - a Web feed of audio or video files that can be downloaded from the internet.

In a runoff for the most creative word, "muffin top" was beaten by "whale tail," the appearance of a thong above the waistband.

Other contenders, created by young women, included prostitot (a child dressed as a pop star), chickenhead (an ugly girl), squares (cigarettes), creepin' and falsin' (cheating and lying in a relationship) and lollipopalooza (a gathering of attractive young men, otherwise known as lollipops).

Editor: Wing