ACADEMIA Letters Functions of bla, bla bla, in one Greta Thunberg speech: A linguistic analysis Francis Oloko, University of Bergen Swedish teen and climate activist Greta Thunberg made the front page of the news last month following a speech at the ‘Youth4climate summit’ on October 5, 2021 in Milan. The leader of the FridaysForFuture movement addresses her fellow youth activists and targets world leaders ahead of the Glasgow COP26. This was probably the occasion for her to increase the pressure on world leaders before they met in Glasgow for yet another climate summit. The media were at the rendezvous of Thunberg’s speech, and many in the press used the same frame in their coverage of this event. The Guardian’s titled: ‘Blah, blah, blah’: Greta Thunberg lambasts leaders over climate crisis; The Washington Post’s headline was: Greta Thunberg says world leaders’ talk on climate change is ‘blah blah blah’; while The Scotsman titled: Climate change: Greta Thunberg’s ‘blah blah blah’ speech makes a coherent and serious point (…).The common denominator in these three titles is the use of the linguistic element bla, bla, bla bla – or blah, blah, blah to summarize the speech each time. Why is this linguistic element so important that the press had to point it out in their titles? I will try to break down the communicative functions of bla, bla, bla in Thunberg’s Milan speech using a linguistic approach and based on my transcription of the speech available on YouTube (https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ceIE_ehQhtc). 1. Bla, bla, bla: a not so empty syntactic element Bla, bla, bla falls under the phenomenon known as represented discourse (RD) (Nølke 2017). RD itself covers “all the diferent textual or discursive linguistic forms used by the speaker to relate to somebody else’s discourse or thoughts”. I will not elaborate on the diferent canonic Academia Letters, December 2021 Corresponding Author: Francis Oloko, badiangoloko@gmail.com Citation: Oloko, F. (2021). Functions of bla, bla bla, in one Greta Thunberg speech: A linguistic analysis. Academia Letters, Article 4190. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4190. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0