Slang, Argot and Ingroup Codes

412 Slang, Sociology See also: Communities of Practice; Identity and Language;

Sociolinguistic Crossing; Subcultures and Countercultures.

Bibliography Anderson L & Trudgill P (1990). Bad language. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Bailey L A & Timm L A (1976). ‘More on women’s and men’s expletives.’ Anthropological Linguistics 18, 438–449. Bailey R (1985). ‘South African English slang: form, functions and origins.’ South African Journal of Linguistics 3(1), 1–42. Boltanski L & Bourdieu P (1975). ‘Reading of Marx: some criticisms in connection with reading the Capital.’ Actes of Research in Social Sciences 5–6, 65–79. Crystal D (1987). The Cambridge encyclopaedia of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Klerk V & Antrobus R (2005). ‘Swamp-donkeys and rippers: the use of slang and pejorative terms to name ‘‘the other.’’’ Alternation (special issue on sociolinguistics), in press. de Klerk V (1997). ‘The role of expletives in the construction of masculinity.’ In Johnson S & Meinhof U (eds.) (1997) Language and masculinity. Blackwells. 144–157. Dumas B K & Lighter J (1978). ‘Is slang a word for linguists?’ American Speech 53, 5–17. Eckert P (2000). Linguistic variation as social practice. Oxford: Blackwell. Fairclough N (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Flexner S B & Wentworth H (1975). Dictionary of American slang. New York: Crowell. Hall L (2002). Cool speak. Hudson Review. http:// www.hudsonreview.com/hall.html Access date 12.11.02. Hayakawa S I (1941). Language in action. New York: Harcourt Brace. Hertzler J O (1965). A sociology of language. New York: Random House.

Holmes J (1984). ‘Women’s language: a functional approach.’ General Linguistics 24(3), 149–178. Holmes J (1992). Introduction to sociolinguistics. London: Longman. Hudson K (1983). The language of the teenage revolution. London: Macmillan. Hughes G (1991). Swearing: a social history of foul language. Oaths and profanity in English. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jespersen O (1922). Language: its nature, development and origin. London: Allen & Unwin. Labov W (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Munro P (1989). Slang. New York: Harmony. Risch B (1987). ‘Women’s derogatory terms for men: that’s right, dirty words.’ Language in Society 16, 353–358. Romaine S (1984). The language of children and adolescents. Oxford: Blackwell. Schlauch M (1943). The gift of tongues. London: Allen and Unwin. Sornig K (1981). Lexical innovation: a study of slang, colloquialisms and casual speech. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Staley C M (1978). ‘Male-female use of expletives: a heck of a difference in expectations.’ Anthropological Linguistics 20(8), 367–380. Sutton L A (1995). ‘Bitches and skankly hobags: the place of women in contemporary slang.’ In Hall K & Bucholz M (eds.) Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self. New York: Routledge. 279–296. Thurlow C (2001). ‘Naming the outsider within: homophobic pejoratives and the verbal abuse of lesbian, gay and bisexual highschool pupils.’ Journal of Adolescence 24, 25–38. Trudgill P (1972). ‘Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich.’ Language in Society 1, 179–196. Tweedle N (2003). ‘Bollocks and gangbang are now just slang.’ Sunday Times (South Africa). July 13.

Slang, Argot and Ingroup Codes C Eble, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Slang, argot, and ingroup codes are sets of words and expressions that are motivated by the social and interpersonal functions of language. Their purpose is to bring about a social bond among their users through awareness of shared knowledge. Such vocabulary is usually an alternative to words and expressions in the

standard variety of the language. For example, many topics that American college students talk about are time-honored on college campuses and can be referred to with general vocabulary. For social reasons, though, at the beginning of the 21st century American students used bia for ‘a thoroughly unpleasant female,’ pimp for ‘a popular male,’ and money for ‘very good,’ as in ‘‘Last night’s concert was money.’’ By comparison with the general vocabulary, such socially salient words and expressions are often shortlived and fall into disuse quickly by being displaced by

Slang, Argot and Ingroup Codes 413

new synonyms. In 2004, American teenagers showed themselves attuned to hip-hop culture by using the slang word bangin’ to describe anything overwhelmingly positive, as in ‘‘Last night’s concert was bangin.’’ Their parents in the 1970s would have said awesome, and their grandparents a generation earlier would have said swell to show that they were part of the group in-the-know in their youth. A comparison between the slang used by college students at the same American university at two points 30 years apart showed that 95% of the items submitted as good, current campus slang in 1974 were not submitted in 2004. Although the actual words were almost entirely different at the two points, the topics were highly congruent. The same meanings – positive and negative evaluations, alcohol and drugs and their use, dress and grooming, and so forth – accounted for about three-fourths of the items in each year (Eble, 2005: 3). Slang, argot, and ingroup code are not technical terms with precise definitions. Slang, the most general and widely used of the three, refers to an ever-changing set of words and phrases that speakers use in casual conversation but usually avoid when writing or when interacting with strangers or on important occasions. The purpose of slang is to establish or reinforce social identity or cohesiveness, either within a group or with a trend or fashion in society at large. Robert Chapman distinguishes two types of slang based on its group delimiting function. Primary slang is ‘‘the pristine speech of subculture members’’ (Chapman, 1986: xii). Secondary slang is ‘‘a matter of stylistic choice rather than true identification’’ (Chapman, 1986: xii). Almost everyone who interacts informally with others uses secondary slang, be it as ordinary and enduring as current American bomb ‘fail miserably,’ hit the hay ‘go to bed,’ and poop out ‘quit’; or as flashy as bling bling ‘jewelry,’ borrowed from hip-hop culture; or as cosmopolitan as metrosexual ‘a fashion-conscious heterosexual male,’ in vogue in 2003. Social groups are fertile breeding grounds for primary slang – a self-conscious, irreverent, and often clever vocabulary to enhance solidarity among members and to set them apart from those outside the group. Often the slang vocabulary that such groups create refers to the activity or behavior that is the basis for their association. Surfers, for instance, have developed many ways to refer to ocean waves and to their equipment. They call ‘the hollow part of a wave’ a tube or a barrel and ‘a surfboard for big waves’ a big gun. Skateboarders call the small injuries of their sport bongos or road rash. Military aviators use bingo for ‘the minimum amount of fuel for a safe return to base,’ music for ‘electronic jamming to deceive radar,’ and nylon letdown for ‘ejection followed by a parachute ride.’ The primary slang of

groups sometimes diffuses into the informal registers of the general population, for example foul up ‘fail through confusion or ineptitude’ and zap ‘kill, put an end to’ from military slang. During the last decades of the 20th century, the slang of African Americans gained widespread recognition and adoption in common parlance, contributing bad ‘good,’ chill out ‘relax,’ homeboy/homegirl ‘friend,’ and many more. Secondary slang signals identification with a style or attitude rather than with a specific, easily delineated group. English coffin nail ‘cigarette,’ freebie ‘article or service given for free,’ sack ‘discharge from employment,’ and loaded ‘drunk’ are all labeled slang in one current American desk dictionary. Yet none of these terms marks a speaker as belonging to a group. The use of slang items like these conveys an attitude of nonchalance, flippancy, or irreverence. For a smoker to call a ‘cigarette’ a coffin nail, for example, suggests defiance of the known relationship between smoking tobacco and fatal disease. Describing an intoxicated person as loaded, polluted, torn out of the frame, wasted, and the like pictures the intemperate drinker as a victim rather than an agent of behavior potentially harmful to the individual or to society. Argot is the distinctive vocabulary developed by a group. Argot differs from primary slang only because historically the terms argot and cant usually applied to groups that operate on the periphery of respectable society, such as con artists, thieves, or, more recently, drug dealers. Their argot is often held in secret and deliberately separates them and their activities from outsiders. At the extreme, the argot of a group that is completely alienated from society, such as prison inmates, can develop into an antilanguage (Halliday, 1976). Personal websites on the internet show that many players of alternative reality games understand the function of antilanguage in opposing the established order and create vocabulary for their imagined antisociety. Players of the role-playing game ‘Shadowrun’ (a registered trademark of Fantasy Productions) form a worldwide community via the internet. One site maintains a ‘Shadowslang Glossary.’ The Shadows is a ‘quasi-criminal world,’ and a shadowrun is ‘any movement, action, or series of such made in carrying out plans which are illegal or quasi-legal.’ An example of Shadowslang is sidewalk outline for ‘a recently deceased person,’ an allusion to the chalk outline of a body at a murder scene. ‘Shadowrun’ vocabulary is evolving and open-ended, and players submit new vocabulary to the list. Ingroup code usually refers to deliberate and collaborative lexical inventions or systematic alterations of the standard language, sometimes involving only two or three people. For English, the widely known pig latin is an ingroup code, though the ingroup

414 Slang, Argot and Ingroup Codes

includes virtually every school child. More typically, ingroup codes are shared by twins, siblings, or an intimate set of friends and seldom exert influence beyond the small circle of users. Like pig latin, ingroup codes may involve deviating systematically from the standard patterns of word and sentence structure. By form, slang, argot, and ingroup code are not distinguishable from the general vocabulary of a language. Ordinary word-building processes apply. In English, slang arises from compounding (freeload ‘take advantage of the generosity of others’); affixation (megabucks ‘lots of money’; spacey ‘unaware’); shortening (abs ‘abdominal muscles’); blending (vomatose ‘disgusting,’ from vomit þ comatose); acronymy (snafu ‘malfunction,’ from situation normal all fucked up; o.d., from over dose); and shifts in grammatical function (creep ‘unpleasant person,’ from verb to noun). The semantic processes favored are those that rely on shared knowledge: metaphor (porcelain god ‘toilet’), metonymy (ice ‘diamonds’), and allusion (oreo ‘black person with white values,’ from Oreo, trademark for a chocolate cookie with a cream filling). The range of meaning evoked by slang, argot, and ingroup codes is narrow, tending to refer to types of people, personal relationships, and judgments of acceptance or rejection. Because these types of vocabulary arise in opposition to a general norm, their tone tends to be negative, and they elaborate on the taboos of the dominant culture. As a result, these kinds of words and expressions are often tasteless or offensive – expressing images of sex, violence, and bigotry. For instance, synonyms for sexual organs include heat seeking missile for ‘penis,’ snapping turtle for ‘vagina,’ and knockers for ‘woman’s breasts.’ The hundreds of synonyms for ‘sexual intercourse’ include bounce refrigerators, bumping uglies, laying pipe, knocking boots, and slamming; and a ‘sexual partner’ is a slampiece. ‘Caucasians’ are honkies, ‘Arabs’ are camel jockies, and ‘Asians’ are gooks. ‘Incompetent or unlikable people’ are assholes, dickheads, and pricks. Technological advances in communication have added new dimensions to vocabulary whose purpose is social rather than ideational. From the earliest observations centuries ago, slang and argot were characterized as primarily oral and linked to subcultures within a society. Slang is now transmitted in writing and across linguistic and cultural boundaries by websites, electronic chat rooms, and email. A kind of e-mail slang marks users in-the-know. Predictable emotions and reactions are often represented by an evolving set of shortenings and acronyms, for instance LOL ‘laughing out loud’ or OMG ‘o, my God.’ Iconic representations of emotions made at

first with key strokes are now a standard feature of word processing graphics, for example ‘smiley face.’ Such emoticons are so widespread that they carry no nuance of irreverence or of in-group knowledge and are now more equivalent to informal oral usage than to slang. The groups that create and maintain slang are now more amorphous and open, and many form deliberately around a common interest rather than on the basis of physical and social proximity. One such group is united by cult-like devotion to the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which ran for seven seasons, 1997–2003. Its distinctive vocabulary was invented by the writers of the drama and promulgated and elaborated on by Buffy fans. Buffyisms are posted on websites, exchanged in e-mail messages, and printed in magazines and books. Linguist Michael Adams offers an insightful analysis of the recently possible linguistic phenomenon in Slayer Slang (Adams, 2003). An even less coherent group is constituted by the followers of hip-hop culture and rap music. The fashion value of the style invented by African American youth in urban ghettos has given international cachet to hip-hop slang such as dawg, floss, holla back, pimp, playa, props, and word. Thanks to new means of communication, youth around the world who have never met or spoken to an African American jockey for social status among their peers by using the slang popularized by hip-hop. Another new dimension to slang and similar kinds of vocabulary is instantaneous diffusion. Live television carries news events and entertainment to distant locations 24 hours a day. Socially salient vocabulary that is created for a film or a television series, a comedy routine, or the lyrics of a song need not spread from one speaker to another by personal communication. An appealing turn-of-phrase can be uttered in a film or on a television program in California one night and be spoken the next day in Munich or Beijing. There is no evidence that written, widespread, and instant diffusion of slang has diminished the long recognized effects of its use. See also: Identity and Language; Partridge, Eric Honey-

wood (1894–1979); Slang: Sociology; Subcultures and Countercultures; Teenagers, Variation, and Young People’s Culture.

Bibliography Adams M (2003). Slayer slang: a Buffy the Vampire Slayer lexicon. New York: Oxford University Press. Chapman R (1986). New dictionary of American slang. New York: Harper & Row.

Slavic Languages 415 Dumas B K & Lighter J E (1978). ‘Is slang a word for linguists?’ American Speech 53, 5–17. Eble C (1996). Slang and sociability: in-group language among college students. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. Eble C (2004). ‘Slang.’ In Finegan E & Rickford J R (eds.) Language in the USA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 375–386. Eble C (2005). ‘Slang and interconnections.’ In Makkai A, Sullivan W J & Lommel A (eds.) LACUS Forum XXXI: interconnections. Houston: Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. 1–7. Green J (1998). Cassell’s dictionary of slang. London: Cassell. Halliday M A K (1976). ‘Antilanguages.’ American anthropologist 78, 570–583. Lighter J E (1994). Random House historical dictionary of American slang (vol. 1 (A–G)). New York: Random House.

Lighter J E (1997). Random House historical dictionary of American slang (vol. 2 (H–O)). New York: Random House. Neuland E (ed.) (2003). Jugendsprachen: spiegel der zei. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Partridge E (1970). Slang to-day and yesterday (4th edn.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rampton B (1995). Crossing: language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman.

Relevant Website http://www.intercom.net/user/logan1/glossary.htm – ‘Shadowslang glossary’ from the role-playing game ‘Shadowrun.’

Slavic Languages L A Janda, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Slavic language group contains three subfamilies: (1) East Slavic, consisting of Russian, Belarusian (Belarusan), and Ukrainian; (2) West Slavic, consisting of Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian (the latter spoken in Germany and also known as Lusatian); and (3) South Slavic, consisting of Bulgarian, Macedonian, Slovene (Slovenian), and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS; formerly known as Serbo-Croatian). The Slavs are believed to have expanded from an area corresponding to southwestern Belarus/northwestern Ukraine beginning in the 6th century C.E. , an event that contributed to the linguistic differentiation of Late Common Slavic (LCS) into the modern Slavic languages. In the late 9th century a Byzantine mission to the present-day eastern Czech Republic yielded translations of liturgical texts into Old Church Slav(on)ic, a written language presumed to be very close to LCS. These documents have made it possible for us to reconstruct the history of the Slavic languages quite reliably. Orthography follows religion in dividing the Slavic languages into an Eastern/Orthodox Christian group that uses the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and part of BCS), and a Western/Catholic and Protestant group that uses the Latin alphabet with the addition of diacritics (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, Slovene, and part of BCS).

Phonological History Within the Indo-European language family, the closest relatives to the Slavic languages are the Baltic languages (Latvian and Lithuanian). Both Slavic and Baltic are ‘satem’ languages, a name based on the Avestan word for ‘hundred,’ which identifies the reflex of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) k’ !s (and g’ ! z), as in the Late Common Slavic (LCS) s]to ‘hundred’. Peculiar to Slavic (though with some analogues in Baltic and Indo-Iranian languages) is the ‘ruki’ rule sound change, which caused s (sˇ) ! x in positions following r, u, k/g, and i, as in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) ousos ! LCS uxo ‘ear’. ‘Ruki’ and ‘satem’ are ancient changes in the development of PIE into Early Proto-Slavic (EPSl). The subsequent era linking EPSl and LCS is marked by sound changes that affected all of Slavic, though their ultimate outcomes are not entirely uniform. Many EPSl-to-LCS sound changes reflect a phonotactic strategy aimed at creating ‘ideal’ syllables of rising sonority and level tonality, i.e., syllables with CV structure where both the C and V elements had the same (high or low) tonality (also known as ‘syllabic synharmony’). The conflict between the most normal structure for a root morpheme, which was CVC, and the ideal syllable structure of CV resulted in the great number of morphophonemic alternations so characteristic of Slavic. The last element in a CVC sequence was in a precarious position: either it was assigned to the syllable containing the preceding CV, in which case sonority constraints made it subject to absorption or loss, or it