What Is Slang? Language That Marks Who You Are

Slang serves several functions at once, which is why it exists in every language that has been studied:

• •Identity marking, signalling membership of a group defined by age, occupation, region, class or interest, which is its primary work
• •Exclusion, since a vocabulary outsiders cannot follow keeps conversations private in public, which is why criminal argots and the coded speech of persecuted groups develop
• •Solidarity and informality, lowering the register to signal that the relationship is not a formal one
• •Expressiveness, supplying vivid alternatives where standard vocabulary is neutral, particularly for approval, disapproval, intoxication and sex, which are the semantic fields with the largest slang vocabularies in every language examined
• •Novelty, which requires constant turnover, since the value of a term depends on its being current
• •Concision, since an in-group term can carry a whole attitude that would take a sentence to state

The formation processes are the ordinary mechanisms of word creation applied fast and playfully. Clipping shortens a word, giving us forms that later become standard. Compounding joins existing words. Semantic shift takes an existing word and reassigns it, which is the commonest route and produces the confusion of a word meaning its own opposite, as wicked, sick and bad have all done. Metaphor and metonymy supply the imagery. Reduplication, infixing and deliberate respelling mark a word as informal. Borrowing takes vocabulary from other languages and, very frequently in English, from African American Vernacular English, which is the single largest source of American and now global slang and whose contributions are routinely adopted without acknowledgement and then treated as generic youth language. Rhyming slang, best known from London, substitutes a phrase that rhymes with the intended word and then usually drops the rhyming part, which makes it genuinely opaque to outsiders and is the clearest illustration of the exclusion function.

A slang term follows a predictable trajectory. It originates in a specific community, spreads through contact and media, and either dies, remains restricted, or becomes so widespread that it loses its marking function and either disappears or enters standard usage. The last route is how a great deal of ordinary vocabulary arrived: mob, banter, bully and dwindle were all once condemned as slang, and Jonathan Swift wrote in 1712 objecting specifically to the shortening of words in a way that now reads as an argument against ordinary English. The rate of turnover is the interesting part, since the value of a term depends on currency, so adoption by the mainstream destroys it, which is why in-group vocabulary must keep moving. That produces the phenomenon of a word becoming uncool precisely because it succeeded, and the reliable indicator that a term has died is a company using it in an advertisement.

The mechanism is unchanged and the speed and geography are not. Terms now spread globally within days rather than regionally over years, which compresses the life cycle enormously and means a word can be coined, spread, become mainstream and die within months. Platforms produce their own varieties, and the same term can carry different connotations on different services. Written informal language has developed its own resources that speech does not have, including deliberate misspelling, capitalisation for tone, punctuation carrying attitude, and emoji functioning as gesture and intonation markers rather than as pictures. Algorithmic moderation has produced an entire category of deliberate substitution, sometimes called algospeak, in which words likely to be suppressed are replaced by coded alternatives, which is the exclusion function reappearing against a machine rather than against a person. And the documentation has improved beyond recognition, since crowd-sourced dictionaries and corpus tools capture terms that would previously have vanished unrecorded.

The objection that slang degrades a language rests on assumptions linguistics rejects. Languages have always changed, and every feature of standard English that now sounds correct was at some point an innovation someone objected to. Using informal register in informal settings is not an inability to use formal register, and the research on code-switching finds that speakers move between varieties according to context with considerable skill, which is a competence rather than a deficit. What the complaints usually track is not language but the speakers: objections cluster around the speech of the young, of the working class and of minority communities, and the same features are described as charming when older or foreign. The legitimate concern underneath is about register appropriateness, meaning knowing which variety suits which setting, and that is a teachable skill that is not helped by telling a child their own community's speech is wrong.

Slang is an informal register that marks group membership, excludes outsiders, expresses attitude concisely and must keep changing because a term adopted by everyone stops marking anything. It is built by the ordinary mechanisms of word formation applied playfully, with semantic reassignment the commonest, and African American Vernacular English is the single largest source of English slang. Words regularly pass into standard usage, which is where mob and bully came from, and complaints about degradation track the speakers rather than the language.