Types of slang used by the criminal underworld

INTRODUCTION This dissertation is about linguistic variation in the English language. Variation in language makes it possible to identify people as belonging to certain social groups by establishing a speaker’s sense of identity. This phenomenon is a typical characteristic of slang. This study is structured in four chapters. The first chapter involves a general discussion of the study of language in use. Slang is a subject that belongs to the field of sociolinguistics. Language is something that is acquired for communication and it is used to establish and maintain social relationships. Sociolinguistics is the field that studies the relationship between the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live. The focus of attention shifts from the sentence to the act of human communication: the speech event. In a speech event there are regularly patterned variations in language. Dialect concerns variations that are located regionally. People also select varieties of language – a suitable style and level of formality – designed to be appropriate to the audience they are addressing. Related to audience design is the concept of accommodation: speakers automatically adjust their speech to be more like their interlocutors. The ability to switch between distinct varieties is called diglossia. Another set of variations concerns register, the variety associated with a specific function and its associated social situation. The social situation is defined by three characteristics: place, topic and role relationship. All together, these characteristics define a typical domain. The speaker who selects a style appropriate to a particular audience is identifying him/herself with that audience and claiming membership of the group. Language reflects and transmits social differences. In cities, there can be a social stratification in the same language; this concept leads us to the first example of language contact: bilingualism. In the speech of bilinguals (for example, immigrants) there can be interference in all aspects of language. Bilinguals often switch between their two languages in the middle of a conversation – a phenomenon known as code-switching – and in some cases they develop a mixed-code. Multilingual communities evolve for a series of historical reasons, such as colonialism or economic migration, which result in multilingual populations. In these societies, language contact often leads to language conflict, where the power of the language of the predominant social group exerts pressure on the language of the minority group. Generally, the former becomes the High (H) or prestige variety for official and formal 4