Alternde Jugendliche ‒ veraltende Jugendsprache. Restandardisierung von juventolektalen Intensivpräfigierungen

Young people become elder and grow out of their adolescence. As their language is ‘aging’ with its users it is becoming ‘adult’ and is losing its sociolectal connotation for the youth of the subsequent generation. Consequently, elements of former youth slang become part of the general colloquial language and so return to common use in the standard continuum they have in many cases been taken from with alienating or parodistic intention, maintaining only their connotation of prestigious youthfulness. The topic of this article are intensifying prefixes and prefixoids used in youth languages. By means of corpus and dictionary investigations will be examined, based on a number of representative examples of prefixed value-positive adjectives, to what extent and in which temporal dimensions those have been integrated in cross-variety common language and in the general vocabulary of public written texts. Objective of the study is to document the (re)standardization process of lexical and morphologic elements of youth language and their ‘aging’ and transition into adult language based on a significant phenomenon of adolescent language use as is the hyperbolic intensification by means of prefixation.