By Mengting Liu
Urban dictionary has become the most frequently used tool for me recently.
As I becoming to know more and more young people from parties and social medias in Montreal, I find out that they talk in a certain way, in which tons of slangs are used. In order to blend in their group, which is composed of Hip-Hop lovers, party goers and “fashion killers”, etc., I start to learn and imitate the way they talk.
“Ayeee, fam, wassup” is for daily greetings; “I dig” means “I understand”; “on fleek” means “flawless, perfect”; “clean” stands for “good, superb”; “no cap” represents “I’m not lying”; “no shade” equals to “no offence”; “Travis Scott is GOAT! Dat tour was liiiit!” means “Travis Scott is the Greatest Of All Time”…
When I firstly saw these expressions, I felt that I knew every single word of them, but I could hardly understand what did it mean in that particular context. I realized that the English I had learnt from school was far from enough if I wanted to communicate with people from different social groups, and I cannot talk as if I were writing a paper.
Henry Fairlie (1979) said, “Even with the most educated and the most literate, the King’s English slips and slides in conversation. There is no worse conversationalist than the one who punctuates his words as he speaks as if he were writing, or even who tries to use words as if he were composing a piece of prose for print.” I assume that many Chinese students, including me, learn King’s (or Queen’s) English at school, and regard it as the only correct way of writing or speaking English. I used to define languages as good or bad, holding the stereotype that non-standard language is for uneducated people.
Now both my daily experience and sociolinguistic are telling me that there is no right or wrong way of speaking a language. Even though some expressions do not follow grammatical rules or meet with the definition on Oxford dictionary, they still cannot be considered as “bad”, and they are just using different ways to express the same meaning. In order to reach communicative goals, it is important to know what kind of language is appropriate in a particular context (Herk, 2012).
References:
Fairlie, H. (1979). Pub talk and king’s English.
Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com
Van, H. G. (2012). What is sociolinguistics.
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Great point, Mengting! It reminds me of one thing many things ago. At that time I downloaded a messaging app, similar to Tandem, through which you could chat with foreign people and maybe improve the English proficiency. I made several new friends but found myself not following them very well. They would use a lot of abbreviations and slang in the communication, which freaked me out. I had to google nearly every sentence they typed, which is so embarrassing and troublesome.
But I think it is a very interesting and study-worthy topic, including the emergence of those “cool language”, the interrelationship between slang and standard language, and the vitality of those expressions.
-Yunjie
Hi Mengting, There are a lot of expressions in this post that I’ve never seen! You make a really good point that the notion of correct (good/ bad) language is not something fixed. It depends entirely on the social context. When I taught ESL, I tried to encourage my students to think about language in terms of appropriateness rather than correctness. For example, when talking to the principal of the university, it wouldn’t likely be appropriate to say “hey, what’s up?” But, on a grammatical level, that question is not incorrect. What do you think of the idea of appropriateness, instead of correctness?
Very interesting, Mengting! Your post really brings me back to the time when I watched “中国新说唱” (The Rap of China). From this TV variety show, I learned many new and cool expressions about hip hop music, many of which, I am pretty sure I can never learn from the “standard language” taught in school.
I really want to share some examples with you, I am sure you must be very familiar with them! “freestyle”, it has become very popular during last year because of Kris Wu. More specifically, it means freestyle rap, it’s an improvisation with or without instrumental beats. “skr”, according to Urban Dictionary, it represents the sound of rubber wheels when you drift or turn abruptly. Nowadays, many rappers use it as a slang word to express excitement or humor. I also like another expression “keep real” (keeping it real), which originally meant to mean being true to oneself and representing oneself in an authentic manner. Today, it has become a philosophy and identity concept in hip-hop culture. From the TV show, I feel hip-hop’s mantra of “keeping it real” is legendary, almost to the point of being synonymous with the culture and genre. All kinds of expressions I learned from hip-hop culture provide an opportunity for me to know a new world. So I really agree with you that we should consider the appropriateness of the expressions in the particular context.
Dantong
Thanks for these Dantong! Your comment takes me back to my years of researching the mixed language of Montreal Hip-Hop lyrics. I was an older adult native speaker of English when I started and in a few years I learned literally dozens of words and expressions that are current in the language, my own language, that I had never heard before.
Hey Mengting, I really love this novel idea of talking about something “cool” in sociolinguistic fields. The article is very informative and interesting. When reading your blog, I was totally impressed by how magical those combinations of words can be in English, the language I though I was familiar with. And I realize that not knowing “how to speak like cool kids”, I missed a lot of fun in my second language learning experience. Actually it is the various and flexible expressions that makes a language more interesting and fascinating. However, it is meanwhile something students usually can’t learn at schools, because attentions are paid to correct vocabulary, proper grammar, ect.
XIN