Variations: Younger Speakers and Slang

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When you listen how younger people speak – and here younger means most people below 50 – you’ll find that they use some specific terms, especially when speaking in a relaxed way. We can call this slang, but the term is not really precise. However, I don’t know a better one for the moment.

For example, they use specific terms for parents:

stara mom ® stari dad		change like an adjective
starci parents (only in plural)

For example, I found this on the Internet:

Moja stara je 2 godine starija od mog starog. (slang) My mum is two years older than my dad.

These words are not offensive in any way (see the Examples below), but they are understood as very informal.

Many other words have additional meanings. For example, the verb brijati (brije) shave is often used in a very unexpected meaning, basically behave or think in a specific, dedicated way, similar to a meaning of English have a trip (e.g. ego trip, guilt trip).

In the weakest meaning, it simply means think (but the implication is often irrational thinking). This is an example from the Internet (you can easily find it):

Brijem [da je jačajak od tebe]. (slang) I think [she’s stronger than you].

Note how the subject in the content clause is implied by the 3rd person singular verb form je² and the feminine gender of the (comparative) adjective: it can be only ona she.

The rest is coming soon... be patient :)

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® The youth slang varies a lot, both within Croatia and in relation to the neighboring countries. For example, a slang word for mother in Serbia is keva, which is never used in Croatia. It’s impossible to describe all variations here, even among the major cities in Croatia. Therefore, at the moment, this chapter will mainly focus on Zagreb.

↓ Examples (click to show)

This random post on Facebook – I simply searched for moji starci – is an example how the term starci has no negative implications whatsoever:

The words above the photo of the grave say (the author wrote ć as c, likely because he was writing on a mobile phone):

dani sjećanja... moji starci... hvala im za sve days of remembering... my parents... thank you for everything (lit. ‘gratitude/thank to them’)

Slike o nama Pictures about us is a song by Detour, a Croatian pop band. The song is about somebody recalling his or her youth, possibly while looking at old photos. The first verse is:

Davno popodne u maju	A long time ago, in afternoon, in May
svi oko torte	Everybody around the cake
još u bakinom stanu	still in Grandma’s appartment
i starci su mladi	And the parents are young

The first line uses the word maj for the month, which is possible in Croatia – of course, svibanj would be the formal word – but in everyday speech, simply peti mjesec would be used.

There are two words for cake: kolač and torta. The latter is basically a big, decorated cake (like birthday cake) which is cut right before eating it. So, this picture is likely about a birthday or something similar.

The word starci has been introduced above: here it means parents, and not simply old people. (But this could be also read in the other way: old people are young, i.e. those who are old now are young in that picture.)

The chorus is:

Slike o našim danima	Pictures about our days
naivan pokušaj	A naive attempt
[da zaustaviš vrijeme	[to stop time
[da ostane zauvijek	[To stay forever
il stane barem na čas]]	Or stop at least for a moment]]

The chorus includes a desire clause (an attempt to...) which, in turn, contains a purpose clause (why do you want to stop time?). In the desire clause da zaustaviš vrijeme the verb is in the 2nd person, literally ‘that you stop the time’; that ‘you’ is generic here, it can be anyone, including the listener. The purpose clause has vrijeme time as the implied subject, therefore verbs are in the 3rd person singular, literally ‘so that (the time) stays forever...’

The song continues:

Banda na klupi u kvartu	The gang on a bench in the hood
pred nekakav tulum	Before some kind of party
mi smo znali u startu	we knew from the start (lit. ‘in the start’)
te noći smo odrasli	We grew up that night
(Nenad Borgudan)

The gang likely refers to a group of friends hanging together. The word kvart means part of a city and it is colloquial, but not restricted to young people.

The word tulum is a slang for usually house party, used mostly in Zagreb. Note also the combination pred¨ + A = before, which has been used for centuries in literature, but some consider it non-standard (recall the description of pred¨ in 36 Dative/Locative and Instrumental Plural).

The phrase u startu is a bit colloquial and corresponds to English from the start.

The song mixes some colloquial and even slang words with quite standard grammar and even standard stress (e.g. odrasli, not odrasli, zaustaviš, not zaustaviš) so all together it doesn’t sound colloquial. It even contains the line (not analyzed above) i najljepši dan što dođe and the most beautiful day that comes, where the relative clause is introduced with što, which is rare in speech, especially in Zagreb (a much, much more common would be i najljepši dan koji dođe; somehow, the što-construction seems to be common in lyrics). In my opinion, the lyrics are uneven, and actually sound a bit artificial (and the song is far from the best songs by the band).

You can listen to it on YouTube™.

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