The latest youth slangs of English language

Are you hench, tonk, butters or chung?

How often have you been sconned on peeve?

Are we chatting fluff, or bumming lemon meringue?

With the possible exception of technology-related jargon, young people’s coinages are now probably the richest source of new language in the English-speaking world. The slang of pre-teens, teenagers, students and young adults uses all the techniques of the world’s most influential language in a riot of creative exuberance. Their codes are used to create in-groups and to keep out the too-old and the terminally uncool, but also just to celebrate being young, gifted - and slack.

Youth’s poses, fads and fashions are not just comical, provocative and innovative, but since the 1950s have been a sort of ‘social laboratory’ in which new ways of thinking and behaving are experimented with.

There is a serious side to analysing young people’s slang. Latest research suggests that what was once a passing fad may be evolving into a genuine dialect, dubbed ‘multiethnic youth vernacular’, with its own vocabulary, accent and intonation. This new form of English, heavily influenced by Black and Asian speech, may actually displace what used to be known as the Queens’ English.

In the last few months there have been a couple of significant eruptions of slang into the UK’s ‘national conversation’, and one important subcultural phenomenon has been confirmed. Radio DJ Chris Moyles caused a furore when he referred on air to a mobile phone ringtone as gay, using the word, like many teenagers, as a generalised term of derision, a synonym for lame. Listeners complained about this latest appropriation of a word previously appropriated by homosexuals, while some gays actually defended the usage as non-homophobic, harmless and frivolous. Microphones left on at the Russian summit picked up the US President, George W Bush, greeting the UK Prime Minister in frat-boy or hip-hop style with ‘Yo, Blair!’. The banter that followed in which both men used boyish colloquialisms, Bush easily, Blair self-consciously, seemed to confirm an unequal relationship between them. On the street meanwhile, and in the playground and youth-oriented media, the black northamerican verbal ritual of signifyin’ or soundin’, also known as the dozens, playing the dirty dozens, capping or bad-talk, whereby males compete to diss one another’s mothers with elaborate slanders, had crossed over to feature in UK speech. The tradition, which some think originates from slave auctions where the infirm were sold by the dozen, was designed to test both speaking skills and restraint in the face of provocation, but now functions as a humorous exchange, also practised by females and non-blacks.