What is "tiếng lóng" or slang? A strange-sounding but well-known phrase
During our research on Vietnamese slang, the VietUrbanary team was quite surprised when we received one question many times:
"What is 'tiếng lóng'?"
The truth is that slang is not a distant term but it appears commonly in Vietnamese daily conversations with others. For example, "anh hùng bàn phím", "chằm kẽm", or "ét ô ét". According to "Tiếng lóng Việt Nam" (2001) by Nguyen Van Khang, slang is simply explained as follows:
Slang is an informal language of communication, used in a limited social circle, temporary and difficult to understand because it is encoded.
All of these words are also known by other more well-known names, such as “network language” or “GenZ language”. However, Vietnamese slang has appeared since our parents' time or even beyond our grandparents' time. The difference is that their vocabulary was undoubtedly much different from what we are using today. Our parents might not understand who is “chị Huệ” (Miss Huệ), but surely we also do not know who is “cô Hồng” (Miss Hồng).