Slang used in Miracle at St. Anna Novel

ABSTRACT

Slang as one of language variety’s phenomena comes from the diversity of the speakers in one environment. The characteristics of slang that are enjoyable, colorful, easy and creative make people tend to use it frequently on their daily lives. Slang appears from social interaction among them. Besides, literary works such as novel that reflects social life are produced and consumed by people to increase knowledge also present slang usage, sometimes. It means, the production of literary works follows the need of society’s language and vise versa. One of them is the novel used in this research. It is Miracle at St. Anna that proposes an extraordinary side of humanism in the atmosphere of World War II. Most of conversations used by the four black soldiers involved in slang. It shows that slang is not only used by teenagers as like public assumption anyway. Soldiers also apply it for several reasons such as to establish a high spirit, dehumanize the enemies etc.

That novel is analyzed using the descriptive qualitative approach in finding slang terms applied. In analyzing the data found from the novel, the researcher comes to several processes. Firstly, finding the dialogues present slang from each chapter of the novel, giving the meaning of all slang found and presenting the processes of slang formation based on the theory of Brinton and Plag. Secondly, displaying those analyzed data in the form of table which is completed with the meaning of each word and the chapter of where it can be found. Thirdly, noting and clarifying the most important points to avoid vagueness for readers.

In addition, the study of slang has some points of views. It could be discussed in the form of its characteristics, reasons for using it, kinds of it or from the side of its word formation processes. On this research, the researcher focuses on investigating slang words used in dialogues of the four black soldiers. It is then viewed linguistically from the process of its formation. Those slang words found are classified into eleventh kinds of word formation processes. Eight of them are verified, those are; reduplication, abbreviations, compounds, acronyms, use of the existing words, creating new words, idioms and blends. While, there are three processes which are not verified; back formation, conversion and derivation. These unverified processes definitely relates to the grammatical rules of English. All of them are conversing one part of speech to another. It means that slang speakers likely leave the grammatical rules in speech.

Finally, the researcher suggests to the next researcher concerns in the similar topic to analyze slang from the aspect of its English grammar due to the fact that mostly slang speakers are speaking against the English grammatical rules to make the simple words.