‘SLANGUAGE’ – Tiếng lóng

English version:

It isn’t a matter of television watching taking the place of dinner conversation anymore. Given all the other screens online, the latest kids on the block often text, rather than talk—even to those sitting close by—and that way of communicating affects language use.

Maria Zijlstra: There’s a focus today on ‘slanguage’, a really neat term for the slang of our language, talking about the just-published book called Word Up to its author, the social researcher who’s made a speciality of trends in generational change as the founder and principal of McCrindle Research.

So welcome Mark to Lingua Franca.

Mark McCrindle: Thanks Maria.

Maria Zijlstra: And you’re adding, what—you have become a linguist, you’re adding a string to your bow?

Mark McCrindle: I guess it is more that the key code that we have, as a society, is the language that we share and, in many cases, [it’s] the language that separates us from other subgroups. So language is a key aspect of social research and it is obviously key to generational research because the language really does map the times that shaped us, the events and the experiences that were formative for us, and so studying language is key really to our social and generational analysis.

Maria Zijlstra: Yeah. And slang, there’s a verbal repertoire that is different from the norm and it’s typically developed and used by every new cohort of youth. What’s different nowadays though is the reach of the technology (that’s something you point out very clearly in your book) that is used to express ourselves. Its spread is so instant, so global, so fast moving.

Mark McCrindle: Exactly, it really is a global generation of young people, more than we’ve ever had before. Even the very people…the friends that they have on their social networking sites and the technological influences, the latest must-see YouTube video—you know—they are globally connected. And so that language knows no geographical bounds, and yet certainly the technology is shaping not just the words that they use but the form of the words, the shortening of words, the use of acronyms, the use of emoticons when they communicate smiley faces in all manner, the technology really has helped shape and shift the English language for young people today.

Maria Zijlstra: Yeah. In the book you list some of those abbreviations, like ‘ab’ for ‘abnormal’, or ‘indie’ for ‘independent’, like anti-commercial. And there’s a—I don’t know how to describe it—a kind of an emptied preposition for ‘as’, you know, something is like something else…

Mark McCrindle: Yeah, ‘I’m busy as’, or ‘you’re crazy as’, for example. So they are certainly changing the language in their own way and there are patterns to it.

Maria Zijlstra: Yeah. There are also acronyms like ‘BTW’, (by the way), or ‘BMW’.

Mark McCrindle: Well, ‘BFF’, another one of those, which more would recognise perhaps as ‘best friends forever’. And this is another shift in language, Maria, that I think is fascinating, that originally we had spoken language and then emerged acronyms, which were more for written form. But now these written forms, ‘LOL’ being a classic example for ‘laugh out loud’, they are now being spoken. So people will say ‘OMG’ or ‘LOL’ or ‘hey, you’re my BFF’ or even, they’ll say, ‘it’s all G’ for ‘it’s all good’. So we have got a change there that now the spoken acronym form, originally used in the written form to shorten a word to make it easier to text or instant message, has now become the default spoken form as well.

Maria Zijlstra: Yeah. ‘DL’ for ‘down low’ doesn’t mean what I thought it might!

Mark McCrindle: No, it means ‘keep it on the quiet’; it means don’t tell others, and that is, again, where—until we learn the code we just don’t understand it. So another one that in fact made it into the Oxford English Dictionary this year is the youth term ‘woot’ (often the ‘oo’ is ’00’, just to add complexity to it), but that is an expression of joy, and it is onomatopoeic. If you think about it, it almost does sound like a chant of joy. But it is a contrived word that they have come up with.

Some are more understandable, ‘whatevs’ is just a shortened form of ‘whatever’, so I think we can understand the context of that. I like how they call the parents ‘the rents’, because the parents do pay the bills. So there is that fun. And some are interpretable. If something is ‘hecto’ we can probably work out it’s probably derived from ‘hectic’ and it sounds bad so it’s good. But other words are harder to understand without the code book.

Maria Zijlstra: The German prefix ‘uber‘ that means ‘over’ and has come to mean ‘ultra’—so that you can have ‘uber-cool’ and you can uberise stuff, someone can be an ‘uber-tosser’ or an ‘uber-moo’—gives also an indication, doesn’t it, of the internationalisation of slang?

Mark McCrindle: Yes, it does, and clearly we’re seeing that in Australia. It’s not just, as people would think, the export of language from, say, an American culture to Australia. Certainly that is part of the slang and so there is words like ‘hooptie’ for ‘car’ or ‘the hood’ for ‘the neighbourhood’, there is some of that, particularly African-American—almost rap slang—that has merged strongly into Australian youth parlance, ‘bling’ for jewellery, that sort of thing.

But, as you said, ‘uber’ and indeed some words coming from Asia as well, we are part of a global generation and that is reflected in the language. Even on that—and I think we’re going to see far more words coming from Asia—there are more people in China each year that go from age 12 to 13, so more people that become teenagers each year there than there are people in the whole of Australia. That’s the scale of things in China. And, of course, many of them are logged on and linked up and connected globally as well, and so we are going to see more of the export of youth culture and slang and products from other parts of the world, particularly the East to the West.

Maria Zijlstra: Now, you reckon that there is an increasing generational gap in communication mores. Why is that?

Mark McCrindle: Well, because the words are being used more broadly and—if we think about youth slang particularly, and we went back in this work, we looked at the bodgies and the widgies of even the 1960s, and there were the hipsters and the waxheads and the mods. And then we looked at how that changed in the ’80s, there were the punks and the ravers and the rappers and grunge, and to today’s youth subgroups, there are the Goths and the emos. But beyond those little subgroups, that not everyone identified with during their youth, we have a wider use of youth slang today across more of the generation, and it’s not just a spoken form. In the past there was a spoken form of youth slang but then the written form was more the shared code of English. But now the written form—through texting, through instant messaging, through social networking—has become a dominant form of communication and so, if we don’t understand the spoken form, chances are we will no longer understand the written form. And that is adding, I guess, some division—so much so that we do have a bit of a stratification in social media where you look at the connection of young people online, and it is mainly between people within just a few years age difference from them. And this is part of, I guess, the youth connecting up and some differences across the generations. It doesn’t mean that they can’t communicate and pick up the more formal English language, of course they can and they do but, in terms of connecting, they have just allowed their slang and form of communication to become mainstream.

Maria Zijlstra: I wonder though because slang is often used at a certain time in life, in one’s own life; a life stage when you are becoming an adult, you are becoming independent, you’re declaring your separation then from the parental authority, and you use that language strongly for a period of time and then it gets dropped and you conform really to the broader society then, later on. Is that a fair enough assessment of what goes on, or is that less so now?

Mark McCrindle: Oh I think that is the case and I’m sure we will see, well, we’re starting to see now with generation Y—as they start families now, as they move out of the education system, move through their economic life and careers—we are seeing them adopt more of a formal language and drop some of the youth language, and I’m sure we will see the same with generation Y, today’s teenagers and children. So I think that life-stage shift remains. The difference is that the life stages are taking place later now. So rather than dropping youth behaviours, activities or slang at 19 or 20, in many cases it is maintained until the late 20s before they move through the adult markers and milestones, sometimes now not until the late 20s, early 30s.

Maria Zijlstra: The kids are still kids when they are a lot older.

Mark McCrindle: That’s right, they are. And I think on the other side of the argument about there being a stratification and a difference, the counter argument—which has a lot of validation I agree with—is that, in some ways, we’ve got parents more connected with their young adult children than we’ve ever seen. I mean, firstly, the parents of today lived through their own fairly radical youth eras and had their slang, and much of that slang has been retained and is still used by the young people.

Certain words have dropped away. If we look at the parents of today they might have used words in the ’60s and into the ’70s like ‘groovy’ and ‘that’s ace’ and ‘that’s rad’ and maybe even words like ‘dweeb’ or ‘way out’. But there are other words, like ‘cool’ that perennially remains, and ‘wicked’ is also being used today. So there are words that certainly have been retained.

They are even taking some of the old slang like ‘cool’ and adding an -ies, ‘coolies’. They’re taking traditional youth slang and tweaking it, and they’re taking those words that we would think mean something else and tweaking it in their own way. Another classic is ‘bananas’ and, apart from the fruit, people in the past would have thought it meant ‘crazy’. But now it means ‘cute’—’that guy’s bananas’, ‘that guy’s adorable’—you know. So that’s how it works.

And, as often happens with this language, we found when we came to decipher it—and we haven’t so much talked about the methodologies here—but we consulted young people around Australia, we had a website up for a long period of time collecting these words. We have also run a lot of surveying of teenagers and young people in focus groups also to gather this, and we find someone will define a word in a certain way and someone else will say, well, it means the opposite. Because it all does depend on the context. So ‘chronic’, it might mean ‘that’s really bad’ or it might mean ‘that’s really good’, it just depends on how it is being used.

Maria Zijlstra: Right. ‘Gay’ has a newer nuance in meaning I noticed, like ‘word up’, the title.

Mark McCrindle: That’s right, so now it means ‘that’s really uncool’, ‘that’s just not happening’, that’s how ‘gay’ would get used. And ‘word up’ means ‘hey, I agree, that’s the truth’. Like, someone might say something, if you agree you would say ‘yeah, word’ or ‘word up’ or ‘amen’ or ‘that’s the way’, ‘I agree’.

Maria Zijlstra: Oh, so it maybe comes from a biblical reference, that’s ‘the Word’.

Mark McCrindle: Exactly, that’s the Word. In a church context in the past they would say ‘amen to that’, and now we’ve got young people that say ‘word up’, ‘you’re on, I agree’. In fact the ‘word up’ reference is more one that has come in from the US.

And the common issue people have when they hear about youth slang is that they worry that we’re using some of…and we do have a rich history of Australian slang that is unique to our culture, but we found that young people are using that. I mean, they are into shortening words, well, Australians have always been into shortening words: we talk about the ‘postie’ and ‘I’m going to the servo’ and ‘I’m going to eat some bangers’ and ‘I’ll have something this arvo’, and so that’s just how we communicate. Well, that’s Australian but it’s also a youth approach. So ‘arvo’ and ‘g’day’ we found are used by the majority of them, ‘no worries’ is very well regarded, even ‘I’m stoked’ and ‘you ripper’ and ‘fair dinkum’ and ‘too right’, those strong Aussie sayings and words are still well regarded by young people and used a lot.

What we did find though is that some of those that I guess we would put in the fairly strong ocker category, that are for, I guess, modern young people in an urban environment perhaps even jarring, they don’t use. So a phrase like ‘you’re not within cooee’ or ‘woop-woop’ or ‘strewth’ or ‘Sheila’ or ‘dinky-di’ or ‘digger’, those strongly ocker phrases, we found that they were less inclined to use, and only a minority, less than one in eight felt comfortable using those. So we still do connect strongly with those Australian slogans and words, but young people have dropped some of them in this journey to internationalism and globalisation.

Maria Zijlstra: Mark McCrindle, head of McCrindle Research and the author of Word Up: A Lexicon and Guide to Communication in the 21st Century.

And, BTW, BMW (in slanguage) does not mean Bayerische Motoren Werke (the Bavarian Motor Works), but ‘bitch, moan, whine’ (or, I suppose, ‘whinge’, to put a more Strine slant on it).

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