13. English- and Spanish-speaking teenagers’ use of rude vocatives

Abstract

So far the description of teenagers’ linguistic habits has been restricted to Europe and the United States. This paper broadens the description by comparing the use of rude vocatives by teenage boys and girls in Latin-America (Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile) and Europe (London and Madrid) on the basis of four corpora of spontaneous conversation. The paper highlights that the teenagers use rude vocatives with no intention to insult but as intimacy-markers signalling social bonding. This is illustrated by extracts from the corpora, which also show that rude vocatives are more often used by the Spanish-speaking than by the English-speaking teenagers, and by the Latin-American teenagers in particular. Chilean huevón, for instance, is used so often that it is developing into a pragmatic marker, while the London teenagers use the neutral vocative tío/a for the same purpose. The rude vocatives are most often used by boys, above all the Spanish-speaking boys, with two notable exceptions: the girls’ boluda in Buenos Aires and gilipollas in London, which points to the ongoing linguistic levelling between the sexes, when it comes to the use of rude words. To end up, three words that have changed from extremely offensive vocatives to more or less accepted intensifiers are given special attention, notably motherfucker, cunt and coño.

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