American Slang and Subculture Groups’ Usage.docVIP

American Slang and Subculture Groups’ Usage Abstract: Slang plays a very important role in American daily life. By studying slang, we may know much about culture, including American subculture, and in turn get better understanding of slang by learning the cultural background behind them. Key words: American slang; American culture, subculture groups I. Slang and Culture Slang in different languages is derived from different origins, also demonstrate cultural differences. Different languages and different groups of people may have different slang, owing to different living environments, social conventions and literature tradition, etc. So, slang as part of language are naturally indispensable to culture. English abounds in slang which are characterized by their colorful and thought-provoking expressions, involving history, religion, social customs etc. Slang as a special form of language exists in both of them and carry a large amount of cultural information such as history, geography, religion, custom, nationality psychology, thought pattern , etc, and therefore are closely related to culture. They are the heritage of history and product of cultural evolvement. Slang varies not only according to the social characteristics of different groups of people (such as age, sex and occupation,), but also according to the social setting in which he finds himself. II. American Subculture Groups’ Slang As for subculture group, it is defined in Websters New Collegiate Dictionary as: an ethnic, regional, economic, or social group exhibiting characteristic patterns of behavior sufficient to distinguish it from others within an embracing culture or society. While the definition, in The World Book Dictionary, is a group of people with distinct cultural traits within a culture or society (Wang Zhongyan, 1993). From the above definitions we know that a subculture group refers to a group of people with common distinct traits in status and concept, code of conduct and living style, h