Saying Good Things, Saying Bad Things in Hungarian Youth Slang

Abstract

This article analyses words and expressions used to say good things and bad things in Hungarian youth slang and is based on Dávid Szabó’s doctoral dissertation entitled L’argot des étudiants budapestois, published in 2004, which contains in its appendix a Hungarian-French bilingual dictionary of youth slang. Based on the corpus of this dictionary, we conducted an online questionnaire survey with three main objectives: 1) to verify the extent of the use of words and expressions to say good things and bad things as attested in Szabó’s dictionary, 2) to compile a new corpus composed of words and expressions representing the current usage, and 3) to analyse some concrete communicative situations in which these words and expressions are used. Our article concludes that Hungarian youth slang is a good example of the dynamism and stability that characterise together slang varieties and a fine illustration of neology in action.