ABSTRACT
Semantic transfer can be a particularly important way of supplementing a lexicon and has been employed as a means of creating in-group terms for centuries. Semantic transfer has been productive in many youth and criminal varieties in recent history also. Semantic transfer is used in cryptic and expressive language because it has great potential to hide in-group meaning and/or to facilitate language play, exclusivity and expressiveness. As the Nouchi examples demonstrate, not all of the items used by its speakers need to be created through semantic transfer alone: 'produit', to take but one, has been taken from French and then subjected to meaning change. As with the creation of new items in language more generally, metaphor is, without doubt, one of the predominant mechanisms that enable semantic change in colloquial language and in youth and criminal language varieties.
