Drinking in Youth Language: A Study of the Language of Young People in Poland

Abstract

Youth language is a variant of the ‘standard’ language and as such is used by peers and is part of a diastratic variation of the language. The use of a specific sociolect by young speakers of a given language is a sign of belonging to a group where age is the determining factor. It is true that the use of certain lexemes is conditioned by the linguistic situation in which people find themselves (diaphasic variation), but it is no less true that certain lexical forms are more used by young people, especially in verbal exchanges with other group members. This paper will aim at presenting the so-called ‘young’ vocabulary that touches on the field of drinking (the names of drinks, the types of alcohol, the verbs used to talk about the action of drinking). The corpus herein will be based on the lexicon that was found on a site for young speakers (www.miejski.pl), which represents the universal language of the youth. The results obtained will be classified according to the lexicogenic processes responsible for the creation of new lexical forms (form, meaning, borrowing). The analysis will deal with contemporary lexical neological forms, such as the words ‘dżudżitsu vodka’ (words ‘vodka’ and ‘jujitsu’), ‘zibol’ (a ‘person who is drinking’; onomatopoeia ‘zib’, i.e. the noise produced during the ingestion of a liquid), ‘tankować’ (‘fuel up’; metaphor), or ‘sztela’ (‘booze’; borrowed from the Silesian speech).