Lexical innovation in the language of young English people

This paper investigates the language of young English people – alias slanguage – in the last few decades. It shows that slanguage displays both social and linguistic features. From the sociological standpoint, it can be viewed as a restricted variety which young people use for various reasons (e.g. to reinforce their connection with a group and exclude outsiders, to challenge their addressees, to show off, etc.). From the linguistic standpoint, it can be viewed as a non-standard variety characterized by lexical innovation in terms of (1) new formations (e.g. shagadelic < to shag + psychedelic) and (2) novel semantic meanings (e.g. fox for ‘an attractive woman’). The paper also shows that, since slanguage is spoken by an unstable minority, it changes over time. That is, new generations have to adjust the language to suit the needs of a changing world, as well as to distinguish from older generations. Hence, they exploit extra-grammatical (i.e. creative and not rule-governed) processes, such as blending, or semantic operations, such as metaphorical extensions, to renew their speech. For instance, the results from an experiment on English informants aged between 18 and 23 have shown that the young are particularly original when they refer to the opposite sex. Moreover, they have shown that the linguistic behaviour of the two sexes is comparable, and that some slanguage expressions which in the past were used only by young men (e.g. babe, lush) are now also popular among young women.