<p>Some people might regard the language of hip-hop as being crude, sexist and inappropriate. Nevertheless, hip-hop culture can also be considered as one of the underground sources of word-formation and language change in mainstream English. Young people have always been a source of language variation and lexical innovation whether we like it or not.</p><p>This essay is focusing on three words frequently used in hip-hop lyrics, namely pimp, queer and chick. The aim of the study is to analyse the semantic change on these words as they are used in hip-hop music and find out whether hip-hop culture has had an influence on the mainstream usage of these words.</p><p>The method used was to study the usage and frequency of these words in hip-hop lyrics and analyse whether there was a similar use in a large diachronic newspaper corpus of American English. The material was predominately found in The Original Hip-hop Lyrics Archive (ohhla.com) and The TIME Magazine Corpus (corpus.byu.edu).</p><p>The results of this study show examples of semantic change in both hip-hop lyrics and mainstream American English and it is concluded that hip-hop culture has an influence on mainstream language above all among the youth.</p>

The aim of this dissertation is to prove that tsotsitaal is widely spoken in the black townships and interferes with the correct usage of standard Zulu. Secondly, the intention is to prove that the influence of Zulu on tsotsitaal is greater than that of any other African language. In chapter 2 the standard language, colloquial variety and tsotsitaal are compared and parallels are drawn between the last two speech varieties. Chapter 3 concentrates on the static and dynamic elements of tsotsitaal as far as morphology is concerned. In chapter 4, the focus is on the meaning of tsotsi words in their social context. Words and phrases which appear and sound like Zulu words spoken by the tsotsis, have a different meaning. Chapter 5 is the concluding chapter. It provides reasons why tsotsitaal is dynamic. It hints at the usefulness of tsotsitaal and its detrimental effects are also pointed out / African Languages / M.A. (African languages)

The present work is a sample study in which the investigator asks a number of randomly selected informants[1]to evaluate a number of items and to answer questions on their take on and understanding of, unconventional language. The focus of the investigation is on the relationship between the interviewees’ understanding and recognition of unconventional language and their particular attitudes towards the same as their ability to recognise slang is compared with their respective attitudes. To fully appreciate the linguistic scope within which this exists, one must acknowledge what it is that generates an informant’s attitudes. The American linguist Penelope Eckert (2000) has in her Linguistic variation as Social Practice written something that quite well captures what it is all about. Here is what she writes: “In many cases it is easy to identity the common endeavour that assembles a community of practice (using language): a garage band, a day care cooperative, a research group, a kindergarten class. That endeavour develops a life of its own as local practices develop around it, transforming the enterprise, the activity, and knowledge. The practices that emerge as a rock’n roll band works together include such things as the choice of songs the band plays, the kind of music, a view of its place in the wider landscape of music, an attitude towards other kinds of music, the band’s “sound” and the contribution of each instrument of that sound, ways of dressing, ways of getting and choosing gigs, ways of performing and behaving on gigs, ways of developing new songs and rehearsing, ways of behaving and talking in encounters with band members and when representing the band. This practise is one that develops – it grows out of the band’s mutual engagement in being that particular band. The individual musicians, through their particular form of participation, simultaneously construct identities of participation in that band. At the same time, that process of construction, engaged in jointly by the various members of the bank, yields a band – or a (speech) community of practice – with a particular character. The character of that band in turn enters into the individual members’ interactions with people outside the band, in the members’ personae at work, at home, and at other bands’ gigs” (Eckert 2000: 35-36). The above captures what attitude ‘is’ in many ways, not merely the explicit attitudes one actively display such as clothes, personal attire or style, but it prevails the sense of what linguistic attitudes are. The use of language, ergo speaking, is what generates our attitudes, or rather linguistic attitudes are maintained and constructed in line with how we like to be perceived, thus what language we wish to use. This is what the present study aims to unfold – what command of unconventional features would a user of language have and what does the informants’ attitudes toward language of this nature look reveal. [1]This is not to say perfectly ‘randomly selected’ but more in the sense that the study is not set against a particular group but rather the contrary, no particular group at all. This is in order to, to the point it is possible, enable the informants to form a model of a general cut of speakers in a society. This should preferably then include people from all segments of a society, as well socially, economically as ethnically. The informants in this kind of segment should further be naturally distributed on the age scale.

Some people might regard the language of hip-hop as being crude, sexist and inappropriate. Nevertheless, hip-hop culture can also be considered as one of the underground sources of word-formation and language change in mainstream English. Young people have always been a source of language variation and lexical innovation whether we like it or not. This essay is focusing on three words frequently used in hip-hop lyrics, namely pimp, queer and chick. The aim of the study is to analyse the semantic change on these words as they are used in hip-hop music and find out whether hip-hop culture has had an influence on the mainstream usage of these words. The method used was to study the usage and frequency of these words in hip-hop lyrics and analyse whether there was a similar use in a large diachronic newspaper corpus of American English. The material was predominately found in The Original Hip-hop Lyrics Archive (ohhla.com) and The TIME Magazine Corpus (corpus.byu.edu). The results of this study show examples of semantic change in both hip-hop lyrics and mainstream American English and it is concluded that hip-hop culture has an influence on mainstream language above all among the youth.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka chatkonversationernas talspråkliga uttryck i form av ord och symboler som förstärkning till skriftspråket på sociala medier. De delar som undersöks är akronymer, förkortningar, fula ord, diskurspartiklar, slang, symboler och humörsymboler. Målgruppen för undersökningen är ungdomar på högstadiet och de sociala medier som används är Facebook och Kik. En infallsvinkel till uppsatsen är att undersöka om det kan utläsas någon skillnad i användningen av tillägg hos killar och tjejer. Undersökningen bygger på de chatkonversationer som informanterna själva valt ut och avidentifierat. Resultatet visar att det finns en del värderande skillnader, men också en del likheter, mellan killarna och tjejernas användning av de olika tilläggen. Resultatet visar bland annat att killarna och tjejerna använder fula ord lika frekvent. En stor skillnad är att tjejerna använder betydligt fler symboler (till exempel hjärta och tummen upp) än killarna medan killarna använder fler humörsymboler (smilisar eller emojis).

Marchand (1969) claims that abbreviations and acronyms, which are also known as ‘initialisms’, are used to create “names of new scientific discoveries, trade-names, names of organizations, new foundations or offices, but occasionally, and chiefly in American English, personal and geographical names are also coined in this way” (Marchand, 1969: 452). However, initialisms that originate from netspeak, such as ‘LOL’, are different from the initialisms Marchand (1969) describes. These initialisms are not names of organizations or scientific discoveries; rather, they describe everyday things or phases. This kind of initialism is a new phenomenon that seemingly did not exist before the Internet, and the aim of this essay is thus to examine whether Internet has given us increased opportunities for this type of word formation. A corpus of informal English was created for this study and ten initialisms were extracted from that corpus. These initialisms were then examined in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The data from the COCA showed that people do form and use this kind of initialism, albeit they do it very infrequently. Furthermore, the corpus data showed that these items are used in all different genres that exist in the COCA, except for academic writing. The data found in this study indicates that people seem create a new kind of initialism, and that people therefore have new opportunities to use this kind of word formation. However, the data is too sparse to draw any definite conclusions from it.

Students at a certain university often develop their own in-group language which only insiders will understand. This phenomenon is very distinctive in IIT Madras. My MA thesis tries to describe and classify the student slang spoken at IIT Madras. This classification is done according to etymological origin and applied word formation patterns on the one hand and according to context in which the terms are used on the other. The results are based on three questionnaires conducted at IIT Madras and via email correspondence.

This paper will analyse code-switching, borrowing, slang, and covert or overt prestige in online and television media. The days of OOH (Out Of Home) advertising are becoming obsolete and moving toward a digital age. South African press aims to create advertising inclusive of all creeds, genders, cultures, and classes, in which all walks of life interact in an ideal society and with humour specific to the locality. Thus, the paper will analyse the advertisers using these linguistic terms, such as code-switching, etc., to create these realities in these advertisements and how they are presented tactically.  The source material is twenty video advertisements ranging from the last fifteen years, 2007-2022. All videos are deconstructed and then examined when and where code-switching, borrowing, slang, and other more seldomly used tactics are found. The advertisements range from banks to fast food companies, which should allow the formality of the ad to have differences in how they approach specific target audiences and the general message they attempt to convey. The results show that all the videos contained two or more code switches, borrowings and slang words or phrases. This proved that their inclusion in the advertisement was not by chance but rather calculated and intentional. They were strategically placed to either add comedy or South Africanise the advertisement to create inclusion. Many adverts used stereotypical language that proved that the adverts were explicitly South Africans as they would only have the exclusivity of understanding it.  This supports that this strategy could be the best way for advertisers to create better engagements for future advertising.

The present study aims to investigate if grade 9 English students, being 15-16 years old, attending a Swedish secondary school, use English slang during their English as a second language lessons, and if so, why they do it, and if there are any differences between the two genders in their slang usage. In order to incorporate a didactic perspective, it is also examined how English teachers deal with their students’ slang usage. Three English lessons has been observed, alongside with interviews with three English teachers, in order to conduct the investigation. The results indicate that slang words are common during grade 9 English lessons, and the male students’ usage of slang exceeds their female counterparts’ usage to a great extent. Reasons for these results can be found in the field of gender language which argues that slang usage, and language usage in general, is strongly connected to identity, and to how the two genders are expected to behave. Moreover, the English teachers display a varied opinion about their students’ slang usage, yet accounts for utilizing it when teaching register and linguistic adaptation. This approach is approved by a great amount of research, which states that by incorporating youth-language, in this case slang, students are able to gain a linguistic awareness where they can identify with what is taught, as well as adapt their language depending on situation and context.

The growing diversity of the United States (US) population demands an equally diverse nursing workforce to meet its healthcare needs effectively. It is a priority to assist students who are English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) to succeed, not just to take care of ESOL and non-English-speaking clients but to add to the nursing workforce. ESOL nursing and client language barriers in healthcare are challenging, but one leading solution is to help ESOL nursing students succeed. For all nursing students to succeed, they must pass the National Council Licensure Examination - Registered Nurse (NCLEX-RN), a multiple-choice high-stakes assessment offered only in English. The problem: ESOL nursing students, who are otherwise knowledgeable, often do poorly on such tests. The NCLEX-RN can be difficult for ESOL nursing students since their lack of proficiency in American English slows their ability to interpret words and phrases in written format. This hinders the student’s ability to understand the relevancy of the words and how the words combine to produce meaningful scenarios and discourse. If test writers removed slang and words with multiple meanings, ESOL nursing students might have greater success on high-stakes examinations, such as the NCLEX-RN. To find appropriate linguistically challenging questions, a search panel comprised of volunteering ESOL Associate Degree in Nursing graduates assembled relevant, challenging multiple-choice questions from high-stakes examination test banks. Each linguistically challenging question was categorized as containing idioms, unclear or unnecessary wording, or slang/difficult American English words. The researcher created a linguistically modified version by removing or replacing the problematic language identified by the search panel. An examination evaluation committee of experienced nursing instructors examined the linguistically modified questions to ensure that the true nursing clinical intention of the question had not been altered. This study used a convenience sample of ADN nursing students (N=169) who had completed Fundamentals of Nursing and Medical/Surgical Nursing 1. The research control group (n=85) received unmodified questions, whereas the experimental group (n=84) received linguistically modified questions. Examinations were distributed by alternating control and experimental examinations to each student. This dissertation presents three reports on the results of removing linguistic complexity from examination questions. The first report presented in Chapter 2 examines the question, "Does ESOL nursing students' performance on linguistically modified examinations differ from performance on unmodified examinations?" This report examined the differences in scores achieved on the experimental versus the control versions of the examination. Nursing students performed statistically better in the experimental group (M = 79.9, SD 7.48) than in the control group (M = 75.08, SD 10.51), t(151.8) = 2.973, p = .003. The second report, presented in Chapter 3, assesses if specific forms of American English adversely affect the performance of low-acculturated nursing students. This chapter presents an attempt to identify the possible effects of idioms, slang, or difficult vocabulary on the success of nursing students in high-stakes nursing examinations. Furthermore, this chapter compares which form of American English, idioms, slang, or difficult vocabulary is more difficult for low-acculturated nursing students. A mixed ANOVA using control versus experimental tests as the between variable and item category as the within variable showed that the group by item type interaction was nonsignificant (F (2, 56) = .016, p = .984), indicating that idioms, slang, and difficult vocabulary do not differ in the likelihood of leading students to select incorrect answers. The third report, in Chapter 4, presents an investigation of the effect of linguistic bias on ESOL nursing students' success. Chapter 4 presents analyses of pass rates on the unmodified examinations achieved by high-acculturated and low-acculturated nursing students. Chapter 4 also presents an examination of the impact of language acculturation on the pass rates on linguistically modified and unmodified nursing examinations based on modified NCLEX-style questions that remove linguistic biases. This chapter presents an investigation of whether low acculturated nursing students who take the linguistically modified nursing examination achieve higher pass rates than those who take the unmodified examination. Based on the results of the chi-square analysis, 35 (81.4%) of the 43 students in the low acculturation group received a passing grade on the modified (experimental) examination, compared to 12 (30.8%) of 39 students in this group passing the unmodified (control) examination. This difference was statistically significant, χ2(1) = 21.42, p = <.001. Results also showed that there is a relationship between high-stakes nursing examination questions containing idioms, slang, and unnecessary words and ESOL nursing student success. The study supported the impact of substituting idioms, slang, and unnecessary vocabulary with more standard English terms on students’ success on multiple choice high-stakes examinations. Although the results do not indicate that ESOL nursing students are more severely or directly affected by specific forms of American English, it does show that identifying these linguistic obstacles may help provide valuable information that may guide creators of high-stakes examinations in designing more bias-free examinations to assist ESOL nursing students succeed and enter the workforce.