He Who Drinks Does Not Think of Evil: How to Say ‘to Drink’ and ‘Beverage’ in the Bulgarian Slang?

Abstract

The last decades  of the 19th century marked  the beginning of  scientific research devoted  to Bulgarian sociolects, especially to the secret slangs of craftsmen: masons, shoemakers, street musicians, beggars, and petty thieves. Gradually, attention was being directed to corporate slangs of schoolchildren and university students of large cities, and it is these particular sociolects that remain at the centre of many studies to the present day. However, slang vocabulary related to drinks and drinking has never been studied in Bulgaria. The proposed article – based on a study of numerous literary and journalistic works, Internet forums, and daily discourse – examines the vocabulary of Bulgarian youth slang for drinks and drinking, its relationship to the standard language and colloquial speech, as well as the differences and similarities between them. The analysed vocabulary is classified according to its affiliation to a specific variation of the national language: standard, colloquial speech, and social dialects. Further, each group is organised according to the lexico-morphological characteristics of the constitutive elements: verbs, nouns or adjectives, as well as verbal or noun expressions.