Youngspeak: Spanish vale and English okay 133
In (7), vale introduces a reaction to what the speaker herself (Anita) has been tell-
ing her friends, that somebody hit her. Example (8) is from a conversation where
Elena and two other girls are talking about clothes. Elena is desperate because she
does not know how to dress. But she suddenly makes up her mind. The sudden
change is introduced by vale, here serving as a reorientation marker, which shows
that the problem is solved. In either case okay is a perfect equivalent. Notice the
use of the vocative tía (originally meaning ‘aunt’) in (8), which is extremely com-
mon in Spanish girls’ conversations but with hardly any correspondence in English
teenage talk, where vocatives are used very seldom.
Since vale and okay have the same functions in conversation, and considering
that okay is used all over the world by adults as well as by teenagers, it is surpris-
ing that it does not seem to have been adopted by the Madrid teenagers. There are
only four examples altogether, three of which are used to signal agreement and
one used as an introductory device (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 633).
- Frequencies
4.1 Vale vs okay
Taking into account the total number of examples, vale, as a pragmatic marker,
was slightly more common than okay, with 2.2 occurrences per thousand words
compared to okay’s 1.9 per thousand words. Their use as pragmatic markers in
relation to the total number of occurrences is shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Pragmatic marker use: vale and okay compared
Item Total PM use % Other %
vale 895 870 97 3
okay 856 804 94 6
The 3% of vale instances that did not serve as a pragmatic marker were used as a
verb, for instance vale caro (‘it’s expensive’). As regards okay, 6% were used as an
adjective (it’s okay, that’s okay, he’s okay, etc.), but there were no instances of okay
as either noun or verb.