Cheli is a
Spanish-language
Spanish ( or , Castilian) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula. Today, it is a world language, global language with more than 500 millio ...
juvenile
sociolect or jargon diatopically restricted to the
Madrid area, developed in the 1970s, primarily associated to the post-Francoist counterculture. It drew influence from the hampa and drug-dealing jargons, and it has been noted for Spanishizing
Caló and
English words as well as rescuing archaic Spanish-language words. Some popular Cheli words (such as ''privar'', ''molar'' or ''vasca'') were actually recorded already in the early 20th century in dictionaries of argot, even if frequently with different meanings.
Other phenomena related to the sociolect include the distortion of words, modified with ''-ata'', ''-ota'' and ''-eta'' suffixes. While as a non-technical jargon, many, if not most, of its words have fallen into disuse as the language evolves, some of them have proven resilient enough to remain in the spoken language at the expense of more recent words.
See also
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References
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Culture in Madrid
Spanish dialects of Spain
City colloquials
Languages attested from the 1970s
1980s in Madrid
Youth culture
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