Peculiarities of Verbal Communication of Some Youth Subcultural Representatives in Spain

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the investigation of the most characteristic peculiarities of the identification mode of certain subcultural representatives compared to the main or dominant culture expression. To this end, the article analyses, firstly, the evolution of the term “culture” and the emergence of the “subculture” phenomenon, the history of the so-called urban tribes formation into a new social phenomenon, as well as the correlations between such concepts as “dominant culture” and “subculture”, “dominant culture” and “counterculture”. Secondly, in the article are described some vestimentary code features and the verbal realization of the identity of bakala, choni and cani subcultures, belonging to the so-called “poligono” groups, numerically superior to other groups composed by marginal young people. From the point of view of the language of these subcultures, they belong to the category of vernacular, based on a mixture of the Andalusian vernacular and a criminal slang. In this regard, the article considers the formation of the slang of similar social groups, the trends in their use of word-formation models and the grammatical design of sentences, as well as the graphical manifestation of their speech features using the examples from video and audio recordings of informants, interviews and blogs of the world youth fashion and showbusiness representatives. The study of a graphic speech representation can be used to investigate tendencies in word reduction or replacement with icons, as well as other features in the language of Internet forums, commentaries on publications and other forms of communication in the Internet.The relevance of this article is in the speech analysis of modern Spanish subcultural representatives that have emerged over two decades and existed in all major cities of Spain, have a certain influence on the speech behavior of politicians and have given new lexical units included in the Royal Spanish Academy dictionary. The article contains not only linguistic, but also extralinguistic material, which can be used in lexicology, linguistic studies, linguoculturology and in the teaching of related disciplines and may be of interest to a wide audience studying Spanish.