'Al seu rotllo': aproximació al llenguatge juvenil català

Abstract

Summary: The paper examines the lexicon used by young Catalan speakers by studying a night-time radio program called Prohibit als pares (‘Parents Not Allowed’), which the station Ràdio Flaixbac FM aired during the period of Sept. 2003–July 2006. The show targeted mainly young people and dealt with topics such as love, sex, friendship, infidelity or drugs. The published materials manage to convey the no-holds-barred nature of the program, rendering the text very close to the hearts of young people, who identify with what is said. Precisely because of the specific features of the show and the accurate rendition of the actual words used by these speakers (and not, as stated, because of the spelling, morphology or syntax), the corpus allows us to describe the colloquial lexicon of young people today: what type of lexical mechanisms are used (loanwords, derivations?), to what extent these mechanisms pertain to the Catalan language or are otherwise borrowed or new, etc. [Keywords: Catalan, lexicon, teenagers’ language, word formation].