The Slang

Slang © http://www.linesandprecepts.com/

Presentation :

Slang is common to every dialects, it embodies the most of it because it is such a whole lexicon specific to an area, a social origin or any kind of membership. For example, "Ay' up me duck" that Jack O'Connell explained and that we presented in our East Midlands dialects article, is Slang.

So obviously there are many kinds of Slang in England, as much as there are dialects area and in addition of that, a whole lot of them occure on people by perpetuate themselves simply thanks to human interractions.

We will report some "social accents" here wich means that they ar not influenced by the location. For example, in the Posh sub-culture article there is a presentation of the Rha slang which belongs to "young posh people" that have this particular speech skill. Also, in the Cockney dialect article we presented the rhyming slang [coming soon].

Here is a short video about rap slang, it is a good way to get familiar with what slang is, but unfortunately with an american accent (private joke). 

As we said, there are a lot of these, so we will describe only two of them for the moment : Thieves' cant and the Polari slang.

Thieves' cant :

This slang is particular because it was originally created to stay secret and was especially used by french peddlers but above all by english thieves and beggars and that's why it was usually considered as hypocritical. It was used from the XVIth century to the XIXth and was common during the Elizabethan period in England, then on the next century, Romanians became users of that Slang.

This Slang barely disappeared and is not used anymore, except in literature or comic fantasies. I wanted to share this article with you because it surprised me a lot, the title is actually : The secret “anti-language”, whom sounds pretty strong for simple Slangs (because  it seems like all Slangs as Polari and Gobbledygook are considered as harmful and detrimental).

Here is an article from the british library where a full text is written in that slang and translated which is very interesting. 

You can ear a bit of that lost slang in this video, sorry for not finding it a TV show or a movie, that would have been better but you can help us to find something by sending a request at this adress : guillaume.derouet.etu@univ-lemans.fr

Polari slang :

Polari is much more particular because in addition to being current it is used by some particular social groups. Indeed words used in that Slang come from Romani : an Indian dialect, Shelta : an Irish tinkers' cant, Yiddish, Italian and some more English different Slangs, as told in this long and complete article.

This Slang was mainly used by actors, showmen, navy sailors, prostitutes or random criminals. It got into gay subculture in the 60's, mainly thanks to the Julian and Sandy radio show that was very much listened at this time.

Did you know that in Polari, acdc (yes, just as the band : AC/DC)  means bisexual ? You will find other surprises in that kind of local dictionary. 

In the following video that is a short movie called Putting on the dish, you can ear Polari that is willingly used. There are some other examples of this Slang, event in TV show but the Doctor Who extract is not on YouTube so we have to cut it and upload it, but we're obviously already out of time so that will may be for next time.