Youth Speak and Street Slang in Novels

Stephen Kelman's feted first novel is told largely through youth speech and street slang. Arifa Akbar talks to him and other writers to explore the vernacular tradition in literary fiction, care of the Independent.

From the article...

Its critical success aside, slang narratives continue to raise debate over what is seen, and sometimes claimed, as a more authentic mode of storytelling, delivered from the apparently unfiltered subjectivities of children and working-class or immigrant margins, and whose speech patterns suggest a closer verisimilitude to the "true" cadences of the street. Yet writers have also, paradoxically, referred to the high levels of artifice inherent in this medium.

Stephen Kelman sought to give his child voice authentic grounding by borrowing from the social reality around him; the geography of his fictional housing estate is the same as the one on which he grew up in Luton (where he continues to live). Some of the peripheral characters are hybrid creations from his own childhood (including an aggressive dog named Asbo) and he recorded the colourful vocabulary of the local teenagers in his neighbourhood to capture the voice of his central character, Harrison Opoku, an 11-year -old immigrant from Ghana.

"I felt from the beginning his voice was authentic. He arrived on my shoulder whispering in my ear," says Stephen Kelman. "There are Ghanaian people around me on the estate. I kept an open ears policy to the words being used around me. Ghanaian slang is very exuberant and cheerful. I'd be on the bus and I'd listen to how the children talked and I'd put it in the book."