Slang across societies : motivations and construction / Jim Davie.

Includes index.

Introduction -- Linguistic data: varities, sources and methodologies -- Non-standard language: concepts and perspectives -- Youth and criminal language practices: attitudes and motivations -- Invention and borrowing -- Semantic change -- The role of affixation -- Compounding and reduplication -- Phonetics and phonology -- Clipping and the use of acronyms and other abbreviations -- Final comments.