I'm going to make a totally wild guess here and suggest that 'young' is out of favour because of implications of relative age - eg, 'You're too young to know...' or 'You're not old enough to realise that...'
'Youth' is a kind of branding of an age group, I guess. And in fact it's a word that (were I to be serious for a moment, which is somewhat improbable) I would connect in a word association game with 'worker' - 'youth worker' - or 'culture' - 'youth culture'. There is (very arguably, I grant you) the notion of a social identity that is associate with age but without any judgemental or relativistic connotation associated with any other age group. 'Youth' stands on its own; 'young' is relative to 'old'.
You're all entitled to say this is total b****cks of course. But even so, I personally definitely don't associate it with ethnicity.
Edit: Looks like rshdunlop and I were hitting the keyboard at the same time and came to the same conclusion
This post was last modified: 14-06-2015 05:51 PM by Mr_Numbers.