Chapter 2. Usage of slang in modern life

1. Colt(Corpus of London Teenage Language)

[In a brief article in “The Mirror” issued 18 July 1997 and headed “Mind your slanguage”. Kids reveal their new lingo’, the reporter Jo Butler comments on the latest slang words in English teen-speak. He quotes words such as bonkers, (‘fun’), chonged (‘tired’), eggy (‘stressed’), sconned (‘drunk’),snash (‘cash’) and skank (‘horrible’), which result from a survey of the language of 800 boys and girls aged between 11 and 18 made by the Corpus of London Teenage Language.3]

Slang words first appear in the articles of COLT only four years ago. That is the point that new slang appears at a very short intervals and slang is going out of the speech for also very short time. Teenagers in metropolitan centers don’t use the same language for a long time; it happens because outdated slang did not catch the attention of teens.

[COLT is a half-a-million-word corpus, compiled in 1993. It consists of surreptitiously recorded spontaneous conversations involving 13 to 17 year-old boys and girls with various social backgrounds and from different school districts in London. The conversations were recorded by the students themselves, so-called recruits, equipped with a small Sony walkman and a lapel microphone, and take place in a variety of settings, most of which are connected with school classroom, school playground, common room, study.3]

          Words and expressions have been identified as slang if they are identified as such in “The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang” and “Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English”. According to the former dictionary, slang is ‘very informal language that includes new and sometimes not polite words and meanings, is often used among particular groups of people not used in serious speech or writing’. After the investigations professors made the conclusion for all the investigation in general and for reasons of using slang in particular. Slang is often used on purpose. One reason could be to show belonging to a group or adherence to a trend, another to keep outsiders outside. In the Swedish “Nationalencyklopedin”, it is argued that the adoption of slang terms is dominated by ‘reversed prestige’. Prestige is concretely based on toughness, power (which can sometimes get into the criminality) and, in spite of this fact, it is mostly used to show the stylistic level of the situation, to empress, unsettle, set the atmosphere down, to made someone get back to the earth and, the last but not least, to be able to play with language and show yourself as a creative and exiting person. But it is emphasized that what finally decides its function is the situation. Most of this is characteristic of teenagers’ use of slang and leads automatically over to the language of the London teenagers in COLT. 

The above review has shown that, although there is consensus that slang covers a large spectrum of colloquial words and expressions, opinions vary when it comes to deciding exactly how wide that spectrum is.

Paying attention to the all London slang can make us founding interesting fact. Most of the slang come out from the Cockney and get into the other parts for a very short period of time. Cockney were men and women who lived in the poor sides of London, like red-neckers in modern America. Their unusual slang was in the feature of non-pronunciation if the sound ‘h’. This fact, together with other features, especially accent, has created new type of language that was called “Estuary English”.

Certain features to do with accent that are typical of Estuary English are also observed in the teenage language in COLT, for instance glottal stop instead of /t/. Rhyming slang, in contrast, has apparently not caught on among the London teenagers, and surprisingly enough, very little influence can be traced from immigrant languages in the recorded material.