English - A language that thrives on diversities

As every year, June was Pride month, celebrating the history, rights, and culture of the LGBTQIA+ communities in many countries around the world.While there is of course some irony in the fact that societal support be visible during just one month of the year, that month has typically culminated in a cheerful Pride March or Pride Parade, also referred to as Christopher Street Day in Germany and many other European countries.I still fondly remember Pride March in London in 2022.It was one of the most vivid and joyful days in my life, and I was struck by the many groups that proudly walked as representatives of their various employers.This year, things were different.Given the current political climates in increasingly many countries, funding for the celebrations had often been drastically reduced, and frequently homo-and transphobic groups had threatened LGBTQIA+ communities.At times to the extent that marches had to be cancelled, as was the case at the Kennedy Center in Washington (US), in Plymouth, Liverpool (both UK), Gelsenkirchen (Germany) or Amritsar (India).When marches took place, individuals were often disallowed to officially march for their employers, the Dsseldorf job centre and the administrative departments of the German Bundestag being two sad examples.Much different from such derogatory treatment of diversity, the world Englishes paradigm has always celebrated variety.And in fact, queer communities have enriched the English language as much as ethnic and social communities around the world have.The use of the pronouns they and them with singular references, originally employed to refer to nonbinary and gender-nonconforming individuals, is increasingly replacing gendered pronouns in mainstream media and public discourse.While this is a recent development, words and meanings that have their origins in queer communities have been captured in dictionaries and glossaries from at least 1910 (Oxford English Dictionary 2025a), today including in the Oxford English Dictionary (oed.com), in the Merriam Webster dictionary (merriam-webster.com)and the Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.org).Many of these words and meanings, for examples serve, shade, slay, tea and werk, come from the drag and ballroom culture of Harlem and from queer slang used by people of colour.Serve refers to the 'display of favourable or attractive qualities, especially those related to beauty and fashion', as in 'Taylor Swift serves one of her most breathtaking looks ever' (Cantor 2025).Slay means 'to perform exceptionally impressive', as in 'She slayed with this outfit' (bloomythecat 2023).'Subtle contempt or disrespect' is expressed with shade as in 'Ryan Giggs Threw Some Serious Shade At Roy Keane On ITV Last Night' (fiodhna_hm 2016).In phrases such as 'We've spilt the tea!Hayley Pearson to join Max Burford on mix 102.3 in 2025' (Bartlett 2024), tea refers to 'gossip'.And werk is used to denote 'to express confidence, celebrate looks or performance', as in 'If you want it, you gotta werk it' (Ang 2019).Other words, such as camp, naff and zhuzh, were initially used in Polari, a slang which 'originated in England in the 18 th and 19 th centuries as a kind of secret language within various groups, including sailors, vagrants, circus people, entertainers, etc., and from the mid 20 th century was adopted by some gay men, esp. in London' (Oxford English Dictionary 2005b).The word camp stands for 'flamboyant' as in 'I've had this one skirt from a Korean brand called KIMHEKIM on my wish list for ages.It's so camp and that's why I'm obsessed with it' (PAKT 2025).Naff refers to things 'uncool' or 'tacky' as in 'It's such a naff thing to talk about Bollywood films' (Kapur Malhotra 2024).And to zhuzh means 'to make stylish' as in 'How to use editing to zhuzh up your story' (Radio Boot Camp n.d.).Today, the above are frequently used in online magazines, popular culture, and on social media, particularly on TikTok, X, Instagram and Facebook, but are spreading into print media, too.