Slang as a core element of youth culture

Сленг как основной элемент молодежной культуры

Слэнг жастар мәдениетінің негізгі элементі

Kyrgyzbay A.K.

Student of Eurasian National University after L. N. Gumilyov, Faculty of Philology, department of the theory and practice of foreign languages,

Astana, Kazakhstan

Yekibayeva N.A.

Associate Professor, Eurasian National University after L. N. Gumilyov, Faculty of Philology, department of the theory and practice of foreign languages,

Astana, Kazakhstan

Key words: slang, slang words, particular context, language, informal conversation, informal word.

It is evident that slang is the use of informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker’s dialect or language. We have tried to reveal slang as a core of youth culture. During our practice we have tried to analyze slang in all its aspects.

Очевидно, что сленг это использование неформальных слов и выражений, которые не являются стандартными в диалекте или языке спикера. Мы попытались выявить сущность сленга, как основной элемент молодежной культуры. Во время наших занятий мы постарались проанализировать сленг во всех ее аспектах.

Сленг дилект пен спикер тілінде қолданбайтын бейресми сөздер мен өрнектердің пайдалануын көрсететіні айқын. Біз жастардың мәдениетіне байланысты сленг мағынасын анықтауға тырыстық. Біздің сабақ беру кезеніңде біз сленгті және оның барлық аспектілерін талдауға тырыстық.

Language is a very complicated and multilayered system that is changing and growing constantly. One of the language layers is slang. It is defined in Oxford Dictionary as “type of language that consists of words and phrases that are regarded as very informal, are more common in speech than writing, and are typically restricted to a particular context or group of people”. According to Urban Dictionary, slang is “the continual and ever-changing use and definition of words in informal conversation”. Thus, we can single out two main features of slang:

· It is normally used in informal speech (rather oral than written)

· It is used as a “secret language” by certain groups of people

Slang is one of the vehicles through which languages change and become renewed, and its vigor and color enrich daily speech. Although it has gained respectability in the 20th century, in the past it was often loudly condemned as vulgar.

Most of us think that we recognize slang when we hear it or see it, but exactly how slang is defined and which terms should or should not be listed under that heading continue to be the subject of debate in the bar-room as much as in the classroom or university seminar. To arrive at a working definition of slang the first edition of the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang approached the phenomenon from two slightly different angles. Firstly, slang is a style category within the language which occupies an extreme position on the spectrum of formality. Slang is at the end of the line; it lies beyond mere informality or colloquialism, where language is considered too racy, raffish, novel or unsavory for use in conversation with strangers. So slang enforces intimacy. It often performs an important social function which is to include into or exclude from the intimate circle, using forms of language through which speakers identify with or function within social sub-groups, ranging from surfers, schoolchildren and yuppies, to criminals, drinkers and fornicators. These remain the essential features of slang at the end of the 1990s, although its extreme informality may now seem less shocking than it used to, and its users now include ravers, rappers and net-heads along with the miscreants traditionally cited.

Slang cannot be defined independent of its functions and use. According to Connie Eble despite the difficulties of defining the term, slang does have some consistent characteristics. Slang is lexical rather than phonological or syntactic. Slang terms do not follow idiosyncratic word order; rather, they fit into an appropriate grammatical slot in an established syntactic pattern. Furthermore, slang follows the same productive morphological processes as the ones responsible for the general lexis, such as compounding, affixation, shortening, and functional shift. It must be added that body language and intonation are often important in indicating that a certain word or phrase is to be interpreted as slang.

Later on, in a somewhat fine-tuned definition, Jonathan Lighter defines slang as “Slang denotes an informal, nonstandard, nontechnical vocabulary composed chiefly of novel sounding synonyms (and near synonyms) for standard words and phrases, it is often associated with youthful, raffish, or undignified persons and groups, and it conveys often striking connotations of impertinence or irreverence, especially for established attitudes and values within the prevailing culture”.

The theme is to be actual as the big quantities of new slang words and expressions have come out recently and the dictionaries of Standard English increase their vocabulary with new words, expressions and phrases that were considered as non-standard lexicon some times before.

We have analyzed and have come to the conclusion that more recently some writers have claimed that the essence of slang is that it is language used in conscious opposition to authority. But slang does not have to subversive: it may simply encode a shared experience; celebrate a common outlook which may be based as much on innocent enjoyment as on illicit activities. Much slang, in fact, functions as an alternative vocabulary, replacing standard terms with more forceful, emotive or interesting versions just for the fun of it: “hooter” or “conk” for nose, “mutt” or “pooch” for dog, “ankle biter” or “crumb-snatcher” for child are instances. The word “punk”, for example, has survived in the linguistic underground since the seventeenth century and among the slang synonyms for money – “ackers”, “spondulicks”, “rhino”, “pelf”- which were popular in the 1990 many which are more than a hundred years old. A well-known word like “coll” in its slang sense is still in use (and has been adopted by other languages, too), although it first appeared around eighty years ago.

Slang is everywhere and youth slang, in particular, exerts enormous power. Slang is to a large extent ephemeral, and so to survive it must constantly regenerate: both the ephemeral and regenerative traits are now here more apparent than in the slang of American youth. The four factors that are the most likely to produce slang are youth, oppression, sports and vice, which provide an impetus to coin and use slang for different sociolinguistic reasons. Of these four factors, youth is the most powerful stimulus for the creation and distribution of slang For, although we are not all members of a group that is oppressed by a dominant culture, or sports fanatics immersed in the language and lore of the game, and we do not all dip our toes into the pool of vice with its attendant argot, we are all young once. When we are young, we are subject to the generational imperative to invent a slang vocabulary that we perceive as our own.

We know that any language has its own specific features and each language including English develops every day, because language lives with the life of nation. Sometimes it can seem really difficult to catch the meaning of word, because English vocabulary increases very fast. So slang's popularity and power with speakers of American English should not come as a surprise. As a species that seems to have a genetic inclination to linguistic creativity, we seem to find endearing slang's “rich flashes of humor and genius and poetry”. With slang, each generation or subculture/counterculture group has the chance to shape and propagate its own lexicon, and in so doing to exercise originality and imagination. The end result is a lively, playful body of language that is at times used for no other reasons than that it is fun to use and identify the speaker as clever and witty.

So the greatest number of new terms appearing in the dictionary is used by adolescents and children, the group in society most given to celebrating heightened sensation, new experiences and lo renaming the features of their world, as well as mocking anyone less interesting or younger or older than themselves. But the rigid generation gap which used to operate in the family and school has to some extent disappeared. Children still distance themselves from their parents and other authority figures by their use of a secret code, but the boomers - the baby boom generation-grew up identifying themselves with subversion and liberalism and, now that they are parents in their turn, many of them are unwilling either to disapprove of or give up the use of slang, picking up their children's word (often much to the latter’s embarrassment) and evolving their own family-based language.

Whatever its source, youth slang is a core element of youth culture, as a defiant gesture resistance and an emblem of tribe identity. Fashion and hair styles are other key manifestations of a generation's identity, but they can be easily regulated by adult authorities. With music and language, regulation and restriction are much more difficult. Even the most vigilant and repressive attempts by adult authority cannot completely eradicate and music with its slang lyrics. Language can be scrutinized and controlled in some places at some times, but it defies universal regulation, which allows its subversive nature to prevail.

We should pay attention to the fact that slang does not necessarily involve neologisms; it often involves the creation of new linguistic forms or the creative adaptation of old ones. It can even involve the creation of a secret language understood only by those within a particular group. As such, slang sometimes forms a kind of sociolect aimed at excluding certain people from the conversation, so that the non-initiate cannot understand the conversation.

To our mind, slang words have already replaced and considered to be the synonyms for many words of Standard English vocabulary, but at the same time American slang is also known for its fertility; it reproduces itself in abundance with each new generation. At any given moment, there are many slang words and expressions in use across the country. By a semantic process akin to natural election, only the strong terms or phrases survive, spreading from the regional, cultural, age or ethnic group in which they are coined. The rest are quickly discarded and forgotten, footnoted testaments to a generation or subculture. Just like a living organism, to counteract its short-lived nature and survive, slang must constantly regenerate as a body of speech and subset of the language. And another fact that many slang words are replaced, as speakers get bored of them, or they are co-opted by those outside the group.

For this reason, according to our experience the existence slang dictionaries reduce the perceived usefulness of certain slang words to those who use them. So we can make a conclusion that new slang words appear almost every day and in order to have no difficulties in communication we should be aware of modern speech, that is mostly presented by slang words.

References:

1. Oxford dictionary, 1989.

2. Urban dictionary, 1999.

3. The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, 2006.

4. Connie Eble, “Slang and Sociability”, 1996.

5. Jonathan Lighter, “Historical Dictionary of American Slang”, 1994.

6. Dalzell Tom, “The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English”, London, 2009.

7. Zuckermann Ghil’ad, “A Beautiful Language”, Canberra, 2007.