The lexical field of body parts in Hungarian youth slang

This paper concerns the analysis of the lexical field of body parts in Hungarian youth slang. Dávid Szabó’s doctoral thesis entitled L’argot des étudiants budapestois (The youth slang of Budapest), published in 2004, which contains in appendix a Hungarian-French bilingual dictionary of youth slang was taken as a point of departure for our own research. On the basis of Szabó’s research and dictionary, our online questionnaire study had two main objectives: 1) to verify the frequency of use of words related to the lexical field of five body parts (mouth, legs, bottom, female and male genital organs) present in Szabó’s dictionary and 2) to collect a new corpus composed of words presenting the actual usage. Our article concludes that Hungarian youth slang changes and does not change at the same time. More than twenty years after Szabó’s research new words are of course used by young Hungarians but the various mechanisms governing word formation in Hungarian youth slang remain the same.

Keywords: body parts; lexical field; slang; Hungarian youth