Jugendwörter in the Corpus
Since 2008, Germany's Jugendwort des Jahres (Youth word of the year) has been named almost every year — chosen by a jury through 2018 and by public online vote since 2020, with no word selected in 2019. Austria has run its own, jury-selected youth word since 2010. The table checks every ranked nomination against the full Songkorpus token inventory. Matching is case-insensitive and looks for the exact nominated form; entries longer than three tokens are excluded.
Linguistic Insights
Hip-hop carries the unambiguous slang
The clearest signal comes from coinages that cannot be confused with ordinary words — Oida, Hayvan, sheesh, sus, YOLO — which sit almost entirely in the HipHop Songs archive. Their concentration there is real evidence that rap is the main route by which youth slang reaches song lyrics. The very highest raw counts are less telling: HipHop is by far the largest archive, so it leads the tally for almost any word.
Frequency is not diffusion
Because matching is purely form-based, a hit cannot tell a word's youth-slang sense from an ordinary homograph — wild and Schere are counted wherever they occur, not only where they carry the nominated meaning. wild alone surfaces across nearly every archive in the corpus, including songs recorded decades before it was nominated: form-based matching cannot separate the slang sense from everyday speech. Moment-bound compounds like Gammelfleischparty, Smombie, and tinderjährig leave no trace at all in the corpus.
| Word | Year | Country | Tokens | Archives |
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These analyses are based on corpus data as of July 29, 2026.