Sections: School psychological service
Communication is one of the most important areas of life for a teenager and a high school student. The formation of the future personality depends on how communication develops. When communicating, the speech of today's youth infuriates teachers, parents, representatives of the older generation, who react sharply to expressions cutting their ears. Indeed, there is something to worry about: according to recent research, in adolescence, the degree of jargon of speech (defined in such a seemingly harmless sphere of general evaluative synonymous words: “good” - “bad”) exceeds 50% for young men and 33 % for girls, i.e. “hit”, “fly away”, “otpad”, “super”, “cool”, “cool”, “cool” and similar words half replace literary expressions.
Speech is a specific form of reflection of reality. It follows the changes taking place in our lives, associated with a change in cultural orientations, values, attitudes.
Youth speech reflects the unstable cultural and linguistic state of society, balancing on the verge of the literary language and jargon. AT different periods The development of society was different and the language. In the 20-30s. colloquial speech was overwhelmed by waves of street elements - homeless children, thieves - as well as the rally language of revolutionary sailors and soldiers (from them - the appeal "brother").
In different periods of history, communities of people, united by a common cause, common interests, and most of all, by the consciousness of brotherhood and alienation from the rest of society, invented their own special ways of communicating, oral and written. For them, it was important that outsiders did not understand them - and hence the various methods of encryption and metaphorization, transferring the meanings of words.
In modern society, the so-called common jargon - an understated style of speech that blurs both the norms of the language and the norms of speech etiquette - is becoming familiar not only in everyday communication, but also sounds in the body - and on the radio. And also the relevance of the cultural achievements of Western civilization present in modern society is a completely natural price for a step taken towards it. What is associated with the show industry, which is based on several socially exploited ideas related to money, sex, violence, jargon, and what is perceived there mainly as a kind of spectacular form, sounds like a kind of guide to action for us.
The youth, being the predominant carrier of jargon, makes it an element of pop culture, which in turn makes it prestigious and necessary for self-expression. There are enough examples of this in the lyrics (“I don’t give a damn about anything” - the Spleen group, “You hesitated” - the Disco Crash group, the words from Mikhey Jumanji’s song: “... in order or to understand the price of life ...” (from English word life - life), in radio programs and musical television, which are guided by a modern high school student.
Rapid and constant acceleration and renewal are the leading characteristics of modern life in which the Russian teenager lives.
Another reason for the use of jargon in youth speech is the need of young people for self-expression and mutual understanding.
Informal communication is subject to such motives as the search for the most favorable psychological conditions for communication, the expectation of sympathy and empathy, the thirst for sincerity and unity in views, the need to assert oneself. In the light of all of the above, communication with comrades becomes a great value for a teenager. It often becomes so attractive and important that the teaching is relegated to the background, the opportunity to communicate with the father and mother no longer looks so attractive.
Full communication in the youth environment is impossible without knowing its language. The youth language implies the use of slang words, swear words as a kind of interjections or simply ways of connecting sentences that do not express negative emotions.
Levin considers the most important processes of adolescence to be the expansion of the life world of the individual, her social circle, her group affiliation, and the type of people she focuses on.
Modern technologies push the limits of communication. For example, the advent of the Internet has allowed modern youth to “hang out” in chat rooms (from the English word chat - chatter) and thereby significantly expand their circle of contacts. And since the bulk of those who communicate in this way are young people, it is not surprising that the corresponding norm of speech is being mastered. And since the behavior of a teenager, a young man is determined, first of all, by the intermediateness of his position, then moving from children's world into an adult, a teenager does not fully belong to either one or the other, thereby seeking support from peers and building a wall of alienation from an adult. The specificity of his social situation and life world is also manifested in the psyche, which is characterized by internal contradictions, the uncertainty of the level of claims, increased shyness and at the same time aggressiveness, a tendency to take extreme positions and points of view. This tension and conflict is the greater, the sharper the differences between the world of childhood and the world of adulthood and the more important the boundaries separating them. Therefore, the degree of "adolescent behavior" is never the same. It takes different forms: in particular, the language of a teenager serves as a protest. And the element that feeds this youth language is everything new, unconventional or rejected: the speech of music fans, music television, in particular MTV, and the speech of drug addicts, computer jargon and urban vernacular, English language and thieves' slang. Each of these components has its own sphere, its own subject and at the same time represents a wide field for borrowing (“do not load me” - from the jargon of computer scientists; “I trudge”, “stick out” from Decl - from the jargon of drug addicts).
Elements borrowed from the literary language are rethought in a playful, ironic way: “it is absolutely parallel to me”, “purely violet”, “on the drum”.
For youth jargon, in addition to alienation, an emotional and playful beginning is characteristic. Why, if young people know how to speak correctly, do they speak incorrectly? Why does he prefer to use condemned forms of speech, knowing the prestigious, normative ones? Yes, simply because it has a different system of values, a different prestige, a different norm - an antinorm. And in this anti-norm, the main principle is the element of shock, shake-up, in order to “sway” the people, and the element of ridicule, so that it is not boring, funny, cool. This is both a challenge to a prosperous, prosperous society, and a rejection of its norms, its models, its decency. “Fly away, fall away, orgasm!” - this is how today's schoolgirl can express delight, she will call boring music “depressed”, and an exemplary classmate - “nerd”.
Another game technique used in youth jargon is the convergence of words based on sound similarity, sound transfer: for example, “lemon” instead of a million, “emelya” instead of e-mail (from the English word e-mail).
So, a joke, a game is a positive element of youth speech. Hardly anyone can seriously fight this.
Another important characteristic of youth speech is its “primitiveness”. The association with the language of some primitive society arises when teachers observe the instability, the constant changeability of the jargon, both in time and in space. Not having time to gain a foothold, some forms of speech give way to others: for example, the not so old slang “mani” (from the English word money - money) was replaced by “bucks” and “grandmothers”. Similar processes were noted at the beginning of the century by ethnographers in the languages of the South American Indians, for which the missionaries did not have time to rewrite dictionaries. This is the natural state of any language education in the period of its formation.
Another sign of the “primitiveness” of youth jargon is the uncertainty, blurring of the meanings of the words included in it. “Dumb”, “cool”, “I'm crazy” can be both positive and negative assessment of the situation. They refer to this as “damn!” and “fir-trees!”, used in jargon only as emotional exclamations, as well as words like “crust (crusts)”, “fun”, “cool”, “fly away”, “plague”. Being used as emotional interjections, they almost completely lose their meaning, which is displaced by the emotional component of meaning, which is strongly accentuated in a certain situation.
The same group includes the phrases full “atas”, “full paragraph”, “full scribe”.
Depending on the situation and circle of communication, these words can express a variety of - up to the opposite - emotions: disappointment, irritation, admiration, surprise, joy, etc. At the same time, more or less adequate “recognition” of the expressed emotion by the listener intonation, facial expressions, gestures of the speaker, as well as context.
A similar phenomenon was once noted by D.S. Likhachev for criminal camp jargon. He characterized it as an atavistic primitivism of speech, similar to the diffuseness of primitive semantics. A similar example was given by F.M. Dostoevsky, observing how men manage in their communication with one unprintable word, putting new meanings into it each time. This primitive atavism Likhachev considered a disease of the language - "infantilism of linguistic forms." It is with this disease that the teacher should fight.
So, the main, reprehensible quality of youth jargon, which is formed by the social circle of a teenager, is its pronounced atavistic primitivism. In addition to vague semantics, it also manifests itself in the understatement of those areas of vocabulary from which its resources are drawn, and in the stylistically understated grammatical means used in speech; these are, in particular, derogatory suffixes - -nyak, -nya (otkhodnyak, depressnyak, tusnyak, tusnya), truncations (botan), familiar suffixes in personal names (Dimon, Kolyan, Yurets). And, finally, in a significant proportion of borrowings from colloquial vocabulary. All these techniques are a conscious choice made in speech behavior between adolescents. And speech behavior is also regulated by the norm or antinorm. Modern youth jargon chooses an anti-norm.
Our study was aimed at identifying the level of jargon in the speech of students in the 10th grade of secondary school. 33 students were interviewed. We needed to find out what modern high school students use in their speech and the reaction of adults to their speech. To do this, we conducted a survey.
The analysis of our results allows us to draw the following conclusions:
- All students surveyed noted that they consider jargon to be an integral part of communication among peers. Such words allow them to assert themselves, maintain good relations with schoolmates, exchange information and learn new things.
- When studying the level of jargonization of speech, it was revealed that swear words occupy the first place among young men, for girls, jargon is primarily a play on words, giving speech a light humorous character. In our study, students noted high level jargonization of the speech of the presenters in television and radio programs, in the publications of newspapers and magazines.
- Today, the dominance of jargon in speech is due to changed social conditions - the priority of material values, the division of society (into rich and poor), changes in interpersonal relations, etc. The guys are increasingly faced with indifference, rudeness, anger. And this, in turn, leads to protest, which is expressed, in particular, by increased jargon of speech when communicating with schoolchildren. Communication with peers, as well as with older friends, continues to be significant for the subjects. They note that they want to spend as much time with them as possible - to walk, relax, have fun, which means they should speak “their” (slang) language.
If we generalize the data obtained and compare them with literary data, then we can describe the “collective portrait” of a modern teenager and high school student.
- The need for communication continues.
- The importance of peers.
- Lack of socially oriented interests.
- Preservation of consumer acceptance of information, but its nature is changing (reading periodicals, porn magazines, drug use, drinking).
- Modern teenagers and young men, describing the ideal interlocutor, put forward - responsiveness, good breeding and erudition.
- There is a need for youth organizations.
Today, there are practically no out-of-school organizations that previously united a significant part of young people and contributed to satisfying their need for communication. This need among today's youth is quite high. A significant part of our subjects noted that they still need some form of organized activity (“Beer Lovers Party”, “Organization for the Protection of Homeless Animals”, “Organization for Helping the Elderly and Lonely People”, etc.).
In addition to everything we have said, it should also be added that today's teenagers and high school students are striving for a family; need the understanding and support of adults; tend to “Escape from reality” (drinking, drugs). Due to the difficult social situation, the children have a high level of anxiety, aggressiveness, and depression. Compared with the literature data, today the number of offenders of this age has increased, as well as the number of suicide cases among children of this age.
Thus, the data obtained in the course of the study confirm the trend towards an increase in the level of jargon of speech among adolescents and high school students.
Youth language or slang refers to a particular form of existing modern language. Probably, we all go through this element, but, as a rule, growing up, we switch to a literary colloquial language.
When studying the language of young people, one should study the reasons for the use of this slang in her speech in such a large amount. There are several basic word-building models of the youth language (youth jargon). Today, the language of the youth subculture can be found both in periodicals and in oral speech. When studying youth jargon, first of all, you need to find out what jargon means. Many people have a negative attitude towards it, although in a number of youth languages you will not find immodest or rude expressions and words.
Determining the cultural and speech assessment of the youth media, it is necessary to consider whole line questions. The priority aspects include: the speech practice of publications, the quality and degree of reflection in the publications of the language of young people.
Like politicians, intelligentsia, journalists, youth is an active representative of the speaking society. Young people often act as initiators in linguistic innovations, so their speech has a powerful influence on the entire speech space in Russian society. The language of youth is not some kind of special social sublanguage, but rather an example of some lexical and phraseological subsystem in commonly used units of the Russian language.
If you study the youth press more carefully, it will become obvious that it focuses on its audience and, of course, it uses linguistic means that are typical for this category of readers. Today, many publications for young people are produced, they are diverse in their subject matter, the nature of the information offered and the types. They can be divided into the following: mass and high-quality, special and universal, and there are also narrow-profile ones (in sports, culture, fashion, education, cinema, computers, etc.).
Not only professional journalists participate in the creation of the youth press (magazines “Rovesnik”, “Sobesednik”), but also young people themselves (“Yunkor”, “Chic”), including students. For example, the journalism departments of many universities publish their own student-issued newspapers. The content of such publications is topics that are of interest to young people, they are devoted to music, new cinema, the life of popular stars, news of an entertaining nature. All of them, as a rule, are revealed using the language of youth, their slang and jargon. Thus, it is easier for young people to adapt to adult life and always be aware of current events. The liberated style in which articles are written in the youth media is a conquest of our time, since now there is an opportunity to freely express one's thoughts and opinions.
The term culture of speech is ambiguous. Among its main meanings, linguists distinguish the following:
"The culture of speech is a set of knowledge, skills and abilities that provide the author of speech with an easy construction of speech statements for the optimal solution of communication problems";
"The culture of speech is a combination and system of properties and qualities of speech that speak of its perfection";
"The culture of speech is the area of linguistic knowledge about the system of communicative qualities of speech."
These three values are interrelated: the first refers to the characteristics of the individual abilities of a person, the second - to the assessment of the quality of speech, the third - to the scientific discipline that studies speech abilities and speech quality. But all three definitions can be combined into one: the culture of speech is such a choice and such an organization of language means that in a certain situation of communication, subject to modern language norms and ethics of communication allow to ensure the greatest effect in achieving the set communicative tasks.
The culture of speech is, first of all, the speech culture of the individual, which is always individual. It is impossible to force a person to use vernacular and swear words in his vocabulary, he chooses his own path. Proper use of the tongue presupposes one's own sense of style, a correct and sufficiently developed taste.
The Russian speech culture of modern young students is a plastic speech environment that quickly responds to the emergence of new things in society, and these changes are reflected in the structure of communication. Major changes that have taken place moral values in modern Russian society, the development of market relations, the influence and distribution in Everyday life professional speech communication, vocabulary of criminal and youth subcultures, borrowing foreign words- all this determined the composition of the Russian speech culture of modern student youth.
Let's try to analyze the state of modern speech culture of young people, to identify its potentials and further ways of its development, to find out the degree of its influence on the level of moral culture of young people. The study of this problem allows us to formulate the following hypotheses:
- - the content of modern Russian speech culture is determined by a number of socio-economic factors and is associated with the moral state of Russian society;
- - the deformation of Russian speech culture occurred, first of all, among modern students, since their speech environment is the most flexible and lexical.
At present, under the influence of the "vulgarization" of public life, the gap between "classical" speech and slang is widening every day. Jargon is crowding out respectable speech and, thanks to mass culture, leaves its mark on the language of the entire nation. With the acceleration of the pace of life and its change, the vocabulary grows and the vocabulary of slang expands accordingly.
With the rapid growth of mass communications, thousands of new words have been added to the lexicon to reflect political and social change. They are reflected in the media and, of course, find their expression in the jargon, which is a challenge to "cultural" life. So, what is youth jargon?
Youth jargon is a special form of language. From a certain age, many of us plunge into his element, but over time, as it were, “emerge” on the surface of the literary spoken language. Youth jargon is based on playing with the word, on a special attitude to life that rejects everything that is correct, stable, boring, routine. Often people of older generations retain a predilection for jargon.
In the vocabulary of youth jargon, two extreme features coexist. On the one hand, concreteness, clarity of definition: the tail is a failed exam or test, the brake is a slowly, stupidly thinking person. On the other hand, amorphousness, blurring of meaning - sometimes jargon words and expressions cannot be accurately translated into literary language: cool - a hard-to-define positive characteristic of a person or object, borrowed from the language of itinerant merchants of the 19th century, cool - a positive characteristic of a person.
In the last decade, youth jargon has been actively replenished with computer vocabulary: metaphorically rethought Russian words (kettle, hang, hack) and numerous English-language borrowings (user, hacker, screw, Windows, soap, emelya). Another feature of youth jargon is the limited subject matter. There are about a dozen semantic classes of names, within which there are many synonyms. These are the names of body parts (lanterns, knife switch, claws), clothes and shoes (shoes, swinger, outfit), money (bucks, grandmas, piece, lemon), some actions and states (pass out, drag, pin) and others. But for many people, jargon becomes a favorite game, and the same versatility allows you to create complex interactions of meanings.
Capacious, sonorous, beautiful words of the native language are replaced by a verbal "husk", behind which there is no content.
For example, a whole series of synonymous words: wonderful, delightful, magnificent, wonderful, wonderful, amazing, charming - is replaced by meaningless cool or cool! This jargon is introduced not only into the speech of young people, but also continues to live in the speech of adults, it becomes habitual, not to mention a more terrible phenomenon - a widespread, almost legalized obscenity ...
Russian youth slang is an interesting linguistic phenomenon, the existence of which is limited not only by certain age limits, as is clear from its nomination itself, but also by social, temporal and spatial limits. It exists among urban student youth - and in separate more or less closed reference groups.
Researchers involved in youth slang include in the scope of study the age from 14-15 to 24-25 years. The comparison shows that the lexicon of different reference groups coincides only partially.
Slangisms seep very intensively into the language of the press. In almost all materials that deal with the life of the young, interests, their holidays and idols, which contain slang in greater or lesser concentrations. And not only in the youth press - "Komsomolskaya Pravda", "Sobesednik", or the newspaper "I'm young", but also in such popular newspapers addressed to readers of all ages as "Arguments and Facts". Newspapers are a valuable source because they promptly reflect the current state of the language.
Today, the Russian language is undergoing tremendous changes. One of the main problems is the problem of borrowing foreign words and speech patterns, which we are increasingly “implanting” into our speech: mentality instead of character, present instead of a gift, and such examples can be given for a very long time. Some borrowed words have changed their meaning due to the influence of socio-political reasons, for example, the word speculator was originally used in the meaning of a small entrepreneur. cultural youth slang speech
Of particular interest is the analysis of speech innovations of young people. Instead, hackers say apple, but this does not mean fruit at all, but the Apple company or the computer of this company. Lamer - a person who does not know how to handle a computer or does not know the rules of behavior on the network. A rat is a pirate (a hacker professionally engaged in removing programs from closed servers and infiltrating closed computer networks using espionage, blocking the network, or causing material damage to participants). All this creates problems of coordinating languages, therefore, in the near future, it may be necessary to create special dictionaries of fidodialects in order to somehow understand the languages of various subcultures.
Inattentive, careless attitude to the norms of pronunciation, stress, use of words, the use of jargon, vulgarism, unjustified borrowings in speech pollute speech, destroy the literary language, and this ultimately leads, as linguists say, to the death of the nation.
The All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion decided to test the literacy of Russians by asking them questions from the Unified State Examination (USE) in the Russian language, which school graduates passed last year. As a result, only 4% of respondents answered correctly to eight simple questions.
Ongoing changes in the domestic knowledge control system, the displacement of the essay by the Unified state exam(USE), the rapid decline in the level of literacy of the population - all this cannot but attract attention. One of the most rapidly spreading stereotypes in society is that the Russian language and literature should be taught and known to the humanities, future philologists. Knowing the literature and being literate is not at all necessary for a mathematician or physicist.
We asked Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University Marina Yuryevna Sidorova to tell us about the consequences of such a view on the education system.
- Marina Yuryevna, tell me, what are the goals of the course "Russian language and culture of speech for non-philologists"? Why should non-philologists and even non-humanities students study Russian language and literature at a university?
— The course "Russian Language and Culture of Speech" is part of the program of humanization of non-humanitarian education adopted in 2001-2002 and, accordingly, the movement of humanitarian specialties towards the natural sciences. According to this program, the humanities received a certain set of subjects, such as "Concepts modern natural science”, “Mathematics for the Humanities” and others, and natural scientists got the opportunity to choose from about ten humanitarian disciplines, one of which was the subject “Russian language and culture of speech”.
For traditional Russian culture, not only the result of any mental activity has always been important, but also the very course of thinking, which can only be expressed in language, in the text. Therefore, any person who receives higher education, be it an engineer, or a geographer, or an economist, a naturalist or a humanist, must be able to express his thought. Moreover, even if a person in his professional activity, as, for example, a chemist or mathematician, operates with the knowledge of other, non-verbal systems, that is, chemical and mathematical signs, he must be able to translate this knowledge into normal Russian.
Any information, knowledge is transmitted primarily through verbal communication. Experienced chess players can silently discuss the game only by rearranging the pieces, because they, as initiates, understand what is happening on the chessboard. But it is impossible to teach a child to play chess without saying a word. Similarly, an experienced tennis player needs only to correct his hand to understand why he has a wrong stroke. But only showing how to play will achieve little.
Therefore, not only for a future scientist or teacher, for a leader, parent, for anyone who is going to work in a team, it is so important to be able to express and transfer knowledge in normal Russian.
In addition to teaching the culture of speech, the objectives of this course include teaching the culture of communication and intercultural communication, which is becoming increasingly important in the era of globalization.
- And what changes in the culture of speech of a modern person have been observed over the past decades?
— There are standard diseases. For example, agnonymy. An agnostic is a word that a person does not understand. Today's youth knows very few words. Including words of traditional Russian culture. It's not that modern man it is imperative to know what a sash is or what a wagon is. But if a person encounters a word many times and does not understand it, then he gets used to reading the text and not understanding much in it. He saw the word many times, but did not remember and will not recognize it. The airship and stagecoach are the same for him, and the elixir is the same as the electorate. Securitization for him is the training of security agents. The second disease is very serious, it is what can be called syntactic incontinence, to use the medical term. This is modern clip thinking. In cognitive science, there is an opinion that it is useful to break up information, presenting it in small parts. It is explained by the fact that RAM can hold about seven elements. But we, with Russian thinking, formed in our open spaces, in the education system, in politics, in fiction, write and speak in long sentences. We have written textbooks, and we also give lectures in long sentences. And a modern young person is often not able to form these long sentences. He writes in the presentation: “Vasya saw an amazing pink bird,” and does not see that “an amazing pink bird” and “Vasya” are in the same nominative case. Why? Because he does not keep this structure in his head. Therefore, he can no longer read any instructions for using complex technology or, say, Yandex's user agreement.
- Modern politicians speak out not only for the abolition of the essay as a final and entrance exam, but also for a significant reduction in hours for literature in high school. Why are such tendencies dangerous?
- The trend is actually very dangerous. And its danger lies in the fact that not only politicians, but many educators are already in favor of canceling the work. Supporters of the USE say that the USE helps to select those people who should study at a university, while opponents, on the contrary, argue that the USE does not allow them to select talented people who must study at the university. Why do we educate people at all? It turns out that we give a person an education in order for him to function with us. In fact, a person does not get an education for an uncle, he gets an education for himself: in order to later have a job, good, highly paid, pleasant, in order to form as a person, to have a high level of spiritual comfort, as the wonderful surgeon Nikolai Amosov formulated it. . Here the study of literature at school helps to form this personality. Literature carries a certain moral charge. We read in War and Peace that Nikolai Rostov owes money and comes to his father and somehow tries to solve this problem. This is some situation in which a young person may find himself. This is a model of behavior that can be discussed. Let me give you a very rough comparison. They ask: why do young people get acquainted on the Internet, despite the fact that these acquaintances are very dangerous? Because this is such a testing ground where you can experience some sensations, try this or that model of relationships. And reading literature also gives a certain model of relations, in which cause and effect are clear, it shows what is good and what is bad.
There is another side. Knowledge can only be transmitted verbally. Therefore, we must check whether a person is able to read a more or less complex text, process it and create another one based on it. The essay checks this. In addition, the essay allows you to check spelling and punctuation. Spelling and punctuation are a certain discipline of the brain. This is generally a human discipline. During the entrance exams, physicists or chemists complain: “We have a person who will pour from test tube to test tube, and you check commas for him.” If a person does not care where to put a comma or a dash, then he does not care. I will not trust a test tube to a person who puts commas badly, because we will all fly into the air. And the exam is a very mechanical activity.
When we write an essay, we write a text. And when a person later comes to work after high school, he writes texts all the time. A manager writes reports, sales plans, a computer scientist or an engineer writes technical specifications. And with the help of his oral and written statements, he builds relationships with other people. This needs to be taught. And capable of this people to select. But I do not see any kind of future activity where it would be necessary to mark with pluses and minuses - right or wrong. I just don't see what the USE is simulating. What real activity?
