The Lexical Field of Love in Hungarian Youth Slang

Abstract

Our research focuses on the analysis of the lexical field of love in Hungarian youth slang. The point of departure of our research is Dávid Szabó’s doctoral thesis entitled L’argot des étudiants budapestois (The youth slang of Budapest), published in 2004, which contains in an appendix a Hungarian-French bilingual dictionary of youth slang. Based on Szabó’s research and dictionary, our online questionnaire study had three main objectives: 1) verify the frequency of use of words and expressions related to the lexical field of love and present in Szabó’s dictionary, 2) collect a new corpus composed of words and expressions presenting the actual usage, 3) analyse some communicative situations in which those words and expressions are used. Our article drew the conclusion that Hungarian youth slang both does and does not change. Nearly twenty years after Szabó’s research, there are of course new expressions used by young Hungarians, but the various mechanisms governing word formation in Hungarian youth slang remain the same.