Neue Tendenzen in der rumänischen Jugendsprache als Spiegel gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche
New Tendencies in Romanian Youth Slang as a Mirror of Social Changes

Summary/Abstract: This article is dealing with the heterogeneous ways of speaking of young people in present-day Romania which are usually subsumed by Romanian linguists under the collective terms argoul tinerilor and limbajul juvenil / tinerilor (in German ‘Jugendsprache’). It draws into focus the latest developments on the level of the lexicon and their connection with the transformation of Romanian society. By way of introduction, the text explores the main features and functions of current youth slang. Generally, it is used in informal communication situations such as relational and physical closeness between the interlocutors, for instance to express highly emotional contents, to make them stand out against the others and to show discontent with social constraints or nonconformist attitudes. However, owing to the spread of the Internet and the new forms of communication such as e-mailing and chatting, the conditions of informal speech and the definition of closeness have changed. As an object of research, youth speech was discovered only in the interwar period. After the end communist era and the absolute restriction of the scientific freedom, there has been a rapid reawakening of interest. As a basis for the following analysis, the fundamental topics and fields of interest as well as the most important methods of lexical innovation which comprehend borrowing from other languages, most notably from Romani and English, are discussed and illustrated using examples from own investigations (since 2003) and from a study written by Susanne Hecht (1998) who collected lexical material in Romanian schools and universities. Special attention is payed to the omnipresence of vulgar expressions and of taboo topics such as sexuality. In order to understand the recent changes since the nineties, entries in Internet dictionary „123urban.ro” and an anonymous Internet survey are analysed and compared with the results of studies from the nineties. Evidently, the centres of interest remain the same: value judgements (mainly about persons), daily life and basic needs, intercourse relations, taboos, violence, extremes in every respect. A bigger part of the former vocabulary is still relevant, though in addition to them a huge variety of neologisms, a few new topical aspects such as Internet and drugs and some very recent trends can be observed. For instance, additionally to older synonyms for „great” from the trade and crafts sector, some military and mechanical engineering terms (robot, tanc) have appeared. Furthermore, there is a clear trend to denote positive concepts by means of words for negative conditions and value judgements (retard, turbat, distrus, naşpa) or vulgar terms (bitch, pulă). In large part, the neologisms (predominantly metaphors and derivations) are still created with elements from standard or colloquial Romanian instead of borrowings from other languages. Superlatives and vocatives or rather filler words such as sclav or slugă are still used over-extensively.

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