Police struggling with shifting meanings of youth dialect have enlisted slang translators
Do you know your “tum-tum” from your “ching” and your “corn” from your “gwop” (gun, knife, ammunition and money)? Neither do police and prosecutors, who have begun consulting a linguistics professor to help decipher urban slang and drill lyrics used as evidence in criminal investigations.
The complexity of inner-city dialects and the growing use of texts and social media posts in court evidence has forced detectives and lawyers in London, the West Midlands and Essex to seek translations, according to Tony Thorne, an academic at King’s College London, who has been studying youth slang since 1990.
Related: Oxford English Dictionary asks teenagers to explain modern slang
Related: It’s bare sick that the OED cares how young people speak | Coco Khan
Continue reading...from Top stories | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FKz1Vj
Post a Comment Blogger Facebook