Global English Slang

Methodologies and Perspectives

Julie Coleman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317934752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Global English Slang brings together nineteen key international experts and provides a timely and essential overview of English slang around the world today.

The book illustrates the application of a range of different methodologies to the study of slang and demonstrates the interconnection between the different sub-fields of linguistics.

A key argument throughout is that slang is a function played by specific words or phrases rather than a characteristic inherent in the words themselves- what is slang in one context is not slang in another. The volume also challenges received wisdom on the nature of slang: that it is short-lived and that slang is restricted to verbal language.

With an introduction by editor Julie Coleman, the topics covered range from Inner City New York slang and Hip Hop Slang to UK student slang and slang in Scotland. Authors also explore slang in Jamaica, Australia, New Zealand, India and Hong Kong and the influence of English slang on Norwegian, Italian and Japanese. A final section looks at slang and new media including online slang usage, and the possibilities offered by the internet to document verbal and gestural slang.

Global English Slang is an essential reference for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working in the areas of lexicology, slang and World Englishes.

Part I

Contemporary slang in the United States and England

Julie Coleman

The first part of this book deals with slang used in the two varieties of English that have exerted the most international influence: the English of England and America (note that Scott discusses Scottish slang separately in Part II). These varieties have well-defined standard forms and a wealth of authoritative dictionaries and grammars to settle any disagreements between them. Learners and speakers of both varieties use terms such as ‘British slang’ and ‘American slang’ as if the slang of all speakers of British and American English is the same. A parallel assumption is that ‘British slang’ and ‘American slang’ are entirely separate entities. In order to explore continuities and differences between the slang of what can seem to be distinct but homogeneous varieties of English, there are six chapters in this section, covering the slang of hip hop, the slang of inner-city youths in London and New York, the slang of English and American students, and the slang of British criminals.

It used to seem possible to draw a clear distinction between British and American slang. Among the list of people to whom his dictionary might be useful, Partridge (1937: ix) distinguished between ‘the foreigner and the American’, but included in his wordlist only ‘such Americanisms as have been naturalized’ (title page). This finely tuned policy became increasingly difficult to observe in editions published after the Second World War (see Coleman 2010: 29). When Partridge’s dictionary was revised for the twenty-first century, it aimed to include ‘slang used anywhere in the English-speaking world’ (Dalzell and Victor 2006: ix) and, instead of aiming to indicate regions of usage, gave the country of origin as ‘UK’ or ‘US’ (from among a range of options). This is a departure from normal dictionary labelling, in which ‘US’ generally implies ‘but not UK’.

For almost a century now, American films, television programmes and music have been transmitting disparate varieties of American English to audiences around the world. American English is the language of global popular youth culture, and familiarity with current American slang is emblematic of familiarity with that culture. Combined with the political and economic power of the United States, these cultural exports have naturally led to changes in the varieties of English spoken in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless (or therefore) ‘the influence of American English breeds a special resentment’ (Humphrys 2004: 131), giving rise to frequent assertions that American English exerts a damaging influence not only on English but also on speakers of English around the world (see Yagoda 2011–13 for the contrary perspective). Honey concedes that American English has virtues of its own, but implicitly excludes its speakers from the ‘[g]uardians of the English language [who] are rightly concerned to try to control the wholesale incorporation of American usages’ (Honey 1997: 247). Honey is not alone: on both sides of the Atlantic, speakers of English sometimes blur the distinction between Standard English and British English. If other Englishes have introduced new developments, the corollary seems to be that British (Standard) English remains pure and constant (Saraceni 2011: 280). The other side of the coin is that popular writers and commentators have often seen slang as a distinctively American phenomenon, whether this is something to be celebrated or deplored. For example, Mencken (1937: 567) asserted that ‘[w]ith the possible exception of the French, the Americans now produce more slang than any other people, and put it to heavier use in their daily affairs’, but he offered no explanation as to how he had measured these trends. More recently, Cassidy (2007: 8) asserted that the Irish ‘invented slang’ through their influence on American English. Although Thorne (Chapter 6) finds a strong current of Irish influence in the language of some groups of British criminals, his survey of the early history of British slang disproves the notion that slang is an Irish or American innovation.

The chapters in this section explore these complementary myths: that Standard English is spoken in its purest form in England and that Americans use more slang. However, they also demonstrate forcefully that the current epicentre of slang influence lies in the commercialization ofAfrican-American culture, and these chapters chart its spread outwards from that starting point. Dalzell (Chapter 1) explores the origins and influence of hip-hop slang, with its connotations of urban gang culture. Green (Chapter 5) explores the slang used in Multicultural London English (MLE), arguing that it represents a combination of traditional Cockney English, Black British (largely Caribbean) slang and American slang, particularly terms associated with hip hop. Although hip hop trades upon its gritty ‘street’ image, Kripke (Chapter 2) demonstrates that its slang does not mirror the slang actually used by inner-city American youths (in New York, at least). Like their inner-city London counterparts, these young people are not passive consumers of commercialized slang: they use it alongside well-established local forms and terms adopted from other varieties of English, notably Jamaican Creole (see Farquharson and Jones, Chapter 10).

Distinguishing between slang and colloquial language is hard enough for native speakers of the variety concerned, but doing so for a variety with which one is not intimately acquainted is next to impossible. As a native speaker of British English, I can assert with some confidence that afters ‘dessert’, money for old rope ‘an easy profit’ and sod ‘a worthless or despicable person (usually a man)’ are (respectively) dialect, colloquial and old-fashioned, but now generally affectionate, though James (2000) includes them in his American dictionary of British slang. This same difficulty in judging the social connotations of de-contextualized language challenges us when we consider the language of groups to which we do not belong. Several chapters in this section describe forms of English that may not seem slangy to their users, but might be considered slang by outsiders. Student slang users may be able to move in and out of their anti-language as the situation demands, but slang is only truly rebellious where it is used inappropriately: in a formal setting or in conversation with a non-slang user. It is probable that the young people whose language is discussed by Kripke and Green are not using slang self-consciously to rebel but (again, unself-consciously) to fit in.

Dalzell sees the influence of prison culture in the low-slung trousers characteristic of hip-hop fashion, and criminality (gangs, drugs, guns and prostitution) clearly feeds into broader aspects of hip-hop culture. Green and Thorne argue that these associations are carried over into the United Kingdom, where MLE is interpreted as a sign of criminality in the press and also criminalized in the legal system by prosecutors whose cases rest on the misinterpretation of slang terms. However, Thorne examines a variety of evidence for criminal slang in the United Kingdom, and finds that different sub-groups use markedly different anti-languages. Prisoners in the category described in police slang as ordinary decent criminals continue to use slang and cant documented in dictionaries such as Tempest’s (1950). In contrast, Thorne finds that a group of Travellers were using a combination of Shelta, Romany, prison slang, Irish slang, cant and Standard English code words to ensure that prison officers could not understand them, and also to cement their group identity.

Paired chapters by Eble and Coleman (Chapters 3 and 4) examine the slang reported by students in the United States and in England. While there are continuities between them (e.g. wasted ‘drunk’, banging ‘excellent’), and while the influence of hip-hop slang is evident in both, there are also marked differences, which demonstrate that among these groups, slang continues to vary on a national level: e.g. bare ‘very, a lot’ (at the University of Leicester); badonkadonk ‘round buttocks’ (at the University of North Carolina and also in New York City). Hip-hop slang influences British students in part through the media, just as it influences American students, and in part through the filter of MLE. It is worth noting that most of the students who provided the slang for both of these chapters were female and middle class, undermining the stereotype of the working-class male slang user.

The chapters in this section all demonstrate the importance of the old and new media in disseminating slang within and between English-speaking nations (see Adams, Chapter 15; Coleman, Chapter 18). Several also reflect on how slang and slang users are reported and represented in the media. Stories about slang have provided frivolous column-fillers about Elizabethan cant surviving in twenty-first-century prisons and sensationalized moral panics about the decline of civilization. In contrast, Kripke finds that journalists reporting on an inner-city youth project wrote enthusiastically and informatively about young people’s attempts to document their own slang usage. The chapters by Eble and Coleman also use data provided by slang speakers, albeit within an educational setting. Peckham and Coleman (Chapter 16) return to the issue of user-slang lexicography with reference to Urban Dictionary.

It is important to remember that even if a term is being used with the same grammatical function and the same referent, its connotations will vary according to the social context. Whip ‘a car’ means something different in the ganglands of inner-city New York than it does among middle-class students in suburban North Carolina. Sick ‘good’ may have been a decisive rejection of social norms when it was used in the early days of hip hop; among students at the University of Leicester it is just one term of approval among many. Blood ‘a fellow Black man; a friend’, also used as a term of address, originated in the Black Power movement of the 1960s. In that context it had connotations of solidarity and masculinity. Neither Dalzell nor Eble cite it in their chapters, but among young people in Britain blood is widely used with connotations of affection or (at least) close association. It is non-gendered and used regardless of ethnicity. Knowing the definition of a slang word can be a very small part of understanding its meaning.

The overlaps and parallels between the slang terms and phrases cited in these chapters are so striking as to undermine the notion that ‘English slang’ and...