Русский молодежный жаргон и его употребление в современном русском языке

Abstract

Since several decades ago, Russia has been demonstrating persistent interest to youth slang. As publications by Russian linguists, sociologists and journalists show, the attitude to slang in this country varies from full antagonism against this phenomenon as the factor of menace to purity of the national language to admiration of youth’s creativity which serves in a way to enrich the standard language. It is no coincidence that recently we have seen a large number of linguistic papers and a variety of slang dictionaries, both monolingual and bilingual, i.e. The Dictionary of Russian Slang, The Russian-English Dictionary of Slang and The Russian-German dictionary of slang. However, Russian-Korean dictionaries (including those which have been published most recently) do not contain slang at all. It causes an awkward situation that Korean learners have no reliable source to obtain any information about words and expressions, which are in fact inevitable in real communication. In this paper, the authors intend to unveil stages of development of youth slang and show ways of formation of slang lexicon and, and more specifically, the means of youth slang expressiveness. No matter how we may judge the ‘jargonization’ of modern Russia, without knowledge (albeit passive) of youth slang it is impossible to comprehend Russian press, Russian modern literature, or the language Russian high schools and universities’ students speak in their daily life. The authors conclude that teaching such element of the Russian language as youth slang on an advanced stage is necessary for understanding of the language of radio, TV and press, as well as casual, ‘free’ speech.