Abstract
The aim of this paper is threefold: first, to introduce the topic of youth slang by giving an overview of its main characteristics; second, to show the different word-formation processes that slang has to make the speaker’s message more expressive; and third, to study the extent to which these two aspects are reflected in two corpora representing London and Madrid youth language. The present study is based, primarily, on an inventory of the top ten ‘proper’ and ‘dirty’ slang words in each language variety with particular emphasis on the speakers’ age and gender, and, secondarily, on the entire corpus data, which showed great agreement with the features outlined in the overview of the main characteristics of youth slang, while the most obvious word-formation mechanisms turned out to be related to change of form and change of meaning.
Highlights
Is youth language poor language? The answer to this question is not straightforward and should be properly nuanced
The development of youth slang is of crucial interest to linguists, and to the population at large, given that youth slang has a tendency to be adopted in the standard language
As argued in Rodríguez (1998: 252), because of the social conditions of its speakers, English has a larger supply of slang words than Spanish, and the same applies to youth slang
Summary
Is youth language poor language? The answer to this question is not straightforward and should be properly nuanced. Youth language is immature and reflects less linguistic competence than adult language This is especially true for the language of teenagers, the 13 to 19 year-olds. Special attention has been paid to the label ‘youth’ or ‘adolescent’ used in them, with the passing of time some words and expressions may have gone into oblivion, and others may have been integrated into the general language. In addition to these data, two corpora of spontaneous teenage conversation were consulted, The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) and the Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm)
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