I was listening to the kids talking the other day. Some of the gibberish they were saying wasn’t English. Some of them weren’t words at all. And yet, they understood each other, and I understood most of it too.
Language is awesome. It’s interesting. It’s really local.
I speak English. English is one of the most widely spoken languages on the planet. Yet 85% of the world’s population don’t speak it. It’s local to those who know it and use it. British English is more local still, spoken by under 1% of the population, just the folks on this tiny island.
I live in Nottingham, where people say “duck” as a pleasantry to strangers (an existing word with a new meaning) and they say “ay up” instead “how are you?”. That’s a specific to less than a million people in the UK.
The kids say ‘bruh’ to mean friend (thanks to school and to YouTube). This isn’t a word spoken by a subset of the above, but a weird Venn diagram of the English population, mostly younger people.
In our house, we’ve got specific things we say. There’s ‘babu’ which was twin-speak for a screen. There’s ‘shellfish’ for selfish and ‘upcited’ instead of excited. As well as kid talk that we’ve adopted, there’s also a lot of references to TV shows like Star Trek and The West Wing.
A lot of those words are just familiarities and straight switches, one word for another, like shared jokes. The TV show references are shorthand back-references for jokes. We see those in work settings too, when someone quotes Blackadder or Monty Python to illicit the memory of the time you found it funny.
Offices are full of local language, since there’s complexity in any domain. We use acronyms and backronyms, and we use nicknames and server names. We look for ways to convey complex information in shorthand, with those common terms existing in the zeitgeist. Examples from previous workplaces include “two-zero” to mean a synchronisation of all Active Directory attributes, and “I have the fez” that meant that this one person was releasing to production, blocking anyone else from doing so. They make no sense at all to anyone who wasn’t part of the small locality that understood the language.
Industries do the same - software testing is full of terms like “equivalence partitioning” that folk inside in the industry agree on as meaning a particular technique.
Hobbies get the same. Subreddits get in-jokes and common terms and words too.
Is it possible that for any group of people who share a commonality that local lingo develops?