AMERICAN PRISON JARGON

The article is devoted to the description of the prison jargon of the American linguistic areal. To date, the studying of social variants of the multinational English language is one of the current trends of modern linguistics. The author aims to give a generalized characteristics of the investigated phenomena taking into account its linguistic peculiarities. It is noted that the given sociolect is an integrated component of the American prison subculture and comes from the British cant. The vocabulary of the representatives of the American prison community is described by stylistic coloration, the existence of the most significant semantic formations for the members of the US prison subculture at the social level. Both standard and substandard means of word formation may be a replenishment source of the social language variety under discussion.