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Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes:
Slang is an area of vocabulary that's constantly changing. Words of approval and disapproval, for instance, very quickly sound outdated as new expressions become more fashionable. Certain words or phrases are used by particularly influential group members and they spread rapidly within that group, but not beyond it. Youth slang, for example, is not adopted by people outside this age group, or if it is, it immediately sounds incongruous, although it's particularly quick to spread among younger speakers - probably due to the tight networks typical of young people at school or nowadays using electronic communication.
It's interesting to note the variety of words used by this group of Salford teenagers for unattractive. The word hanging - never pronounced with an initial - has been in use in Manchester for a long time as a term of disapproval generally. An awful party could be hanging, terrible food might be hanging and clearly these teenagers feel a person can be physically hanging. The word skanky, on the other hand, has its origins in US slang and is used to mean dirty or revolting and thus also ugly. The word minging is a long-established Scottish dialect term for smelly, but has been adopted by young speakers all over the UK as an offensive term to describe members of the opposite sex, either as an adjective, minging or as a noun, minger. The origins of the word munter, however, are extremely obscure. Being munted has been an underground expression for some time to describe the state of someone under the influence of drugs. Perhaps by transference, munter is used by these speakers to describe someone they wouldn't find attractive. More intriguingly (but probably less likely) could it possibly be related to the Zulu word muntu, meaning human, adopted by some White South Africans as a derogatory term for a black African?
There are a number of features of these teenager's accents that are typical of speech in Salford. Listen to the way they pronounce the sound in the words minger and hanging. This is a characteristic feature of speech in the north-west of England and the West Midlands. The vowel sound used in the final syllable of the words skanky and really is typical of younger speakers in places like Manchester and Leeds. Above all though, the vowel sound used by these teenagers in the final syllable of the words minger and munter is a distinctive feature of speech in Manchester, particularly in the Salford area.
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