Chav/chaval

A new one to me: chav is British English for “a young working class person who dresses in casual sports clothing” (via Naked Translations). The standard etymology is Romany, and the term’s Hispanic cognate, chaval, forms part of the lexicon of Spanish gypsy language, Caló. (The Grec Catalan dictionary suggests, on the other hand, that it may derive from an Arabic word for boy, xâbb, as in Cheb Khaled; the Central American chavo is semantically related but etymologically obscure.) Xaval gives rise to one of the names for Barcelona’s strongly Spanish working class dialect, xava, “characterised by the elimination of voiced consonants and of open and neutral vowels”, although not all at once.

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Comments

1. kalebeul » More chavales sez:
   June 14th, 2005 at 18:49

   [...] More chavales

   Re chav, here From a lexicon of flamenco song terms derived from Caló and thieves’ dialect [...]

2. kalebeul » Quillo/chav/blah sez:
   June 30th, 2006 at 17:26

   [...] This Cádiz lexicon says quillo is used indiscriminately to attract attention, rather like “¡Oye!” in Spanish and its English cognate, “Oi!”, or, alternatively, like the English “Love”. In Barcelona (and presumably in other Spanish cities) quillo is also used derogatively, to express perceived ethnic and class distinction, rather like the British “chav“–see eg here. Quillo comes from chiquillo, ~”lad”, and also appears as illo, and probably not just in Málaga. Trevor on 2006/6/30 @ 17:26 in Splog, Of etymology, Les bourgeois ‹‹ Goodbye Word Cup ‹‹ [...]

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