Helsinki Slang

Helsinki slang or stadin slangi ("Helsinki's slang", from Swedish stad, "city"; see etymology) is a local dialect and a sociolect of the Finnish language mainly used in the capital Helsinki. It is characterized by its abundance of foreign loan words not found in the other Finnish dialects.

Helsinki slang first evolved in the late 19th century as a sociolect of the multilingual Helsinki working class communities, where Swedish and Finnish speaking youth lived together with Russian, German and various other language minorities.

Grammatically Helsinki slang is based on colloquial Finnish. It is characterized by a large number of words originally borrowed from Swedish, German and Russian, but nowadays chiefly English, vocabularies. The loanwords replace some of even the most mundane Finnish-language words (closest kin words, "food", "die" etc.) with foreign alternatives. However, when spoken by a native Finnish speaker, all words are inflected by the rules of spoken Finnish, and the language sounds distinctively Finnish.

The language's history can generally be divided into the 'old' slang (vanha slangi) and the 'new' or 'modern' slang (uusi slangi). Old slang was common in Helsinki up to the mid-20th century, and is thicker and harder to understand for an outsider of the group, even to one who would be capable in modern slang, because it incorporates far greater amount of Swedish and Russian loanwords than the modern variation. Old slang is mostly spoken by older Helsinkians, many of whom consider it the only true slang.

The modern variety has evolved side-by-side with the growing influence of English-language youth subcultures starting from the 1950s. It is thus characterized by a greater influence of the English language and proper Finnish language while the influence of Swedish and Russian has declined. The modern slang is healthy and continues to evolve. It is spoken to varying degrees by almost all native Helsinkians.

Read more about Helsinki Slang:  Etymology, Language Characteristics, Usage and Examples, Famous Speakers, Literature

Famous quotes containing the word slang:

    It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)