Slanguages: Languages in the Creative Economy

What is Slanguages? How are slang and community languages related to the creative economy? Why should we care?

This presentation will seek to answer these questions by drawing on the work of a major 4-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded £4m research project that explored creativity and multilingualism between 2016 and 2020. By working with a wide variety of artists and creatives who use different languages in their practices, a range of examples will be illustrated to show how formal and slang forms of languages have been used for self-expression, community representations, and communicative purposes. Creatives on our project used at least one other language in their work in the creative industries alongside English. They have also played with the spoken form and performance of languages, sometimes blending and mixing languages to speak, sing or perform through slang, and sometimes creating their own unique slang as a result. By drawing on these examples a case will also be made as to how the creative economy is enhanced and could be developed further through creative and academic interactions.