How do languages develop slang?

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My little cousin and I seem like we speak different languages and have different meanings for all different words. Even though I’m technical “Gen Z”, he just turned 9 and already has his own vocabulary that he learned at school. My mom says it was the same for her and I. Can someone explain if there is an actual science behind this?

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“More often, slang serves social purposes: to identify members of a group, to change the level of discourse in the direction of informality, to oppose established authority.”

That is, it’s  often very much a “Thrse people are in my group, and these people are not.”

That’s  just from a quick google  from open universities. Credited to Tom Macarthur.

It’s  a pretty good eli5 bit there is a lot to it, it’s  a very interesting field. Slang is often part of the ‘pragmatics’ arm of linguistics,  obviously  there’s  a lot of semantics as well and the sociological aspects

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