Slanguage – The History And Evolution Of Slang In Our Daily Life – 2005 – Past Daily Pop Chronicles.

Here’s something I’ll bet you never thought much about. But thanks to BBC 1Extra and a broadcast from August 23, 2005, you can hear all about it.

Language is supposed to be something we all share. But listen closely and it becomes clear that language is also one of the easiest ways to tell who belongs—and who doesn’t. Every generation, neighborhood, profession, subculture and social group develops its own words and expressions. Some disappear almost as quickly as they arrive. Others escape their original surroundings and eventually become part of everyday speech. That constantly changing vocabulary is what we call slang.

Slang is considerably older than the word itself. Long before anyone called it “slang,” people were developing unofficial vocabularies. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, the language of thieves, beggars, travelers and other outsiders was often called “cant.” Thomas Harman’s 1566 glossary of the language of vagabonds and rogues is an early record of this phenomenon. By the eighteenth century, specialized vocabularies had become sufficiently common to inspire dictionaries of their own. Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1785, became one of the great early attempts to document the unofficial language of everyday life.

The word slang itself appears in English in the eighteenth century. Its earliest recorded meanings were associated with the vocabulary of people considered disreputable—particularly criminals, tramps and others living outside respectable society. By the nineteenth century, however, its meaning had expanded to include the informal, colorful language of ordinary people. The precise origin of the word remains debated, although one influential theory connects it with a northern English word referring to territory or “turf,” eventually becoming associated with the people occupying that territory and the distinctive language they used.

That history tells us something important: slang isn’t simply “bad English.” It is often identity in verbal form. It tells someone where you come from, what generation you belong to, what music you listen to, what neighborhood you inhabit, or what group you identify with. And because slang is constantly being invented, borrowed, distorted and reinvented, it provides an unusually vivid record of social change.

America became particularly influential in this process during the twentieth century. African American communities, jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, street culture and later hip-hop contributed enormous amounts of vocabulary to American—and eventually international—English. What began in one community could travel through records, radio, television and eventually the internet. Cambridge’s history of English notes the extraordinary worldwide influence of American slang, while more recent linguistic scholarship observes that African American speech has become particularly important to the development of contemporary slang.

Hip-hop accelerated that process dramatically. By the 1990s and especially the 2000s, rap was no longer simply a musical genre. It was a global cultural language. Regional expressions from New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and other American cities could suddenly reach audiences thousands of miles away. Words could move from a neighborhood to a record, from a record to radio, from radio to television and eventually into ordinary conversation.

The 2000s were especially fertile. Southern hip-hop brought words such as “crunk” into the mainstream, while “swag”—an older word that acquired new life and meaning—became one of the decade’s defining expressions. British urban culture was simultaneously developing its own vocabulary, influenced by Caribbean speech, African languages, London street culture, grime and American hip-hop. The BBC 1Xtra documentary Slangtionary, broadcast in August 2005, captured this linguistic moment, examining expressions such as “endz,” “blud,” “nang” and “butters.”

What makes slang fascinating is that it is never finished. Yesterday’s slang can become today’s ordinary English. Words that once sounded shocking eventually appear in dictionaries, newspapers and polite conversation. Meanwhile, today’s perfectly familiar expressions are already being replaced by something newer.

Perhaps that is why slang has always made respectable society nervous. It is language without permission. It belongs to the people who use it, not to dictionaries, teachers or institutions. And every time a new generation invents a new way of saying something, it is quietly reminding the rest of us that language doesn’t belong to the past.

It belongs to whoever is speaking now.

Dive in.

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