By Tony Thorne. If you struggle to understand the teenagers and young people around you when they call their schoolfriend a
durkboi and try to cadge some
peas, you are not alone. The idea that they are communicating in a different language from their parents has been the subject of excited chatter on
parenting websites and among some
researchers.
A defining characteristic of youth slang is thought to be its faddishness – the fact that terms have a rapid turnover, quickly coming in and out of fashion and then disappearing before parents and teachers have time to decode them. The reality is more complicated: novelty is all-important but for each generation the expressions they encounter will be new to them. So although each age group and almost every local clique do invent their own words, there is a common core of slang that persists for years: such as
cool,
wicked,
solid and
sick for good, and
chilling for relaxing.
The new language used by the young is not one unified dialect but an intersection of styles, with vocabulary drawn from a number of sources. There is the edgy street language of gangs which has given us
shank and
jook for stab; and
merk to hurt or humiliate. There is also
boyed for shamed,
durkboi and
wallad for fool, dozens of terms for drugs and money and the greeting
braap! picked up and used by innocent teens who may not have realised that it imitates the sound of an automatic firearm.
Many other words belong to
MLE – multi-ethnic or multicultural London English – sometimes derided as
jafaican, the speech variety strongly influenced by Caribbean usages and non-European accents and parodied by Ali G and TV comedy Phoneshop. Among the most pervasive are
bruv,
mate,
bare,
fam,
gwop or
peas (money), and
chirpsin',
linkin' and
lipsin' – flirting, dating and kissing respectively.
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