So I need to get away from using the lingo of Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. and develop the lingo for my story in New Tokyo, California. I know enough Japanese to incorporate it into my slang, but I was wondering if anyone had good advice for deciding how to develop a local lingo for cyberpunk or other near sci-fi genres.
Just think about how slang develops in the real world. The slang is derived from the things around them, it doesn't just jump up in a vacuum. Slang isn't made, it's grown; it's about reference and inference. So in a town where (just of the face of it it would appear to me) that the dominant culture is Japanese but where the population is (again just assuming) American; that'll give you a really weird and interesting set of slang. I would imagine it'll be snippets of Anglicized Japanese. Fortunately we already have some of that around; words like chibi and kawaii and tsundere and such that have come over and are used as a slang within the Anime/Manga fan culture here. And that gives rise to compound cross lingual words. I remember things like Chibitalia (a portmanteu of Chibi and Hetalia - From Axis Powers Hetalia) being used in shows and I think people would start to pick those up too. Also think about the brands and the games that people play. That'll tell you a lot about how their slang will grow up. Think to how it's now very normal to say "Just google it" or "The new iPhone" when not that long ago those sentences wouldn't have even made sense. And the language that is necessary to play their games will migrate out into their everyday lives too. It's still something weird to me (as someone who only ever played Eve Online) that people talk about guilds instead of corps. In my game everything was naval terminology because it's all space ships; we talked about fleets and corps and jump points; lightyears and AU and warp speed. That's a very specific patois to that game that most people don't speak. It'll be the same for the people you're writing about too. Way back when (like 2006) I was in a corp that was space pirates; one of my friend's wife bought him a literal real world parrot that he taught to say 'ganked' because, well, why the fuck not? Oh and thinking of that; underground subcultures tend to be really foul mouthed because it's where the bad kids end up and that brings in other stuff too. Make sure you know the words for the popular drugs of that place too, because that's stuff that they'll be familiar with even if it's not something that gets touched on in the story.
Thank you, I've started making brands and such for my setting to help flesh things out and I'm fleshing out the game two of the major characters play together to help develop the local language. It's been a huge help now and I'm getting a better feel for the process. Sorry for the lateness of my reply. I was still fighting with Nanowrimo at the time I posted this.
No worries at all I think that as you start to flesh out with brand names and get a sense for the things the people use every day will really help you get it figured out. I wish you luck with your cyberpunks
I completely agree with @LostThePlot - portmanteau is the way to go. It's how slang develops now, and there's no reason to think that this will change. So it's a matter of taking the words and concepts you want to express and mashing them together to make new concepts. It's useful also to consider the functions of slang. Make sure you don't just use slang for the sake of it, or it will be obvious you're trying to look cool by making up slang words. The purpose of slang isn't to look cool. It's to facilitate informal communication within a specific group of people (and optionally exclude people outside that group who wouldn't understand the terms being used). Slang terms are therefore either synonymous with words used by the wider population, or are compounds of existing words used to express things not expressed by others. I guess what I'm trying to say is, start with what you want your characters to be communicating about and then decide which terms you want to use. Make sure your slang terms have clear roots in real languages in order to make it seem authentic, and use terms sparingly as overuse will appear contrived.
Extremely well put. When people use slang just for the sake of it they will always look like posers and it'll always sound forced. You can look at slang almost as a kind of technical jargon for social situations. The slang of drug users is used to talk about things there either isn't really terminology for or what exists feels inappropriate. There's a difference between getting high and getting stoned and tripping out. Phrases like 'nodding out' express things that normal people just wouldn't think to have words for. Same of the paraphernalia and substances. It's why we end up with very direct and to the point names for drugs and their accouterments, because it's functional first and foremost. We have a bong and a pipe and a joint; crack and smack and speed; rigs and pins and cookers. This is a technical language that was made up because the other words didn't exist or weren't suitable for clandestine activity. I remember that ages ago I saw an advert for the first Slipknot album which included a quote from a review which was "...more worrying than finding blood in your toilet bowl." Now if you're a metal head you kinda know what that means. It communicates something about the music. When someone says this album is really brutal or savage or it's just fucking metal; that does actually mean something to those talking. And that might sound really opaque and weird to people who don't get it; but it's hard to communicate the shades of grey in really fast, aggressive, screamy metal. I mean, you could reasonably describe Judas Priest as fast, aggressive and screamy; but you probably wouldn't call them brutal. Some slangs are more or less functional than others, and some slang is just for fun or is taken from popular things of the day; in jokes more than they are actual slang terms. But even so, slang is always there to serve a communicative purpose. Sometimes it is obfuscative; a way to tell apart one of us from one of them, but it's always got that sense that it's helping people to communicate things that they talk about a lot in a convenient way.
That's a nice way of putting it. I suppose it's also about efficiency - you can express something quite nuanced and subtle using a slang term for which there isn't a synonymous non-slang term. Your examples from drug culture are interesting because this is a culture for which vocabulary did not exist - the terms were, presumably, made up by the users in order to describe their experiences to others. Which is, presumably, how any slang develops. Personally I quite like slang, but only when it's portmanteau or neologism. Appropriation of existing vocabulary as slang is, however, rather irritating in my opinion.
Yeah, pretty much. It didn't totally not exist. There was already medical terms. But it wasn't really conversational. You could talk about 'intravenous injection of diacetylmorphine', which is technically correct, but even though they mean the same thing we get a very different meaning from 'shooting smack'. That's something unique about drug slang, because it's fuzzier and more general because, well, street drugs is a rather fuzzier world than that of pharmaceuticals. And the slang kinda fits that. You buy drugs by the weight of the substance, not the actual drug content. So drug users talk about this H has 'longer legs' (ie lasts longer) but that one has a 'heavier hit' (stronger high). Even pot smokers get into it; phrases like 'whole body high' are out there in that community too. You could probably communicate this all in medical terms but that wouldn't mean a lot to the average drug user. It's just... Well, its interesting. Because it's something that's spread far and wide and managed to do so even without the internet. It was never agreed that these terms would be used. Just it made sense and it was helpful for people to talk about things that they dealt with a lot. It's much the same how people in the same work place or the same industry come up with ways to talk to each other. It's just all about communication. It's the same way that we here talk about pantsers and planners; about MCs and Mary Sues. Ways to talk about things that come up a lot.
