Language understanding across generations

The work deals with understanding the language of the older generation by young people and vice versa - how the old generation understands the present-day youth; how the old generation is versed in expressions commonly used by the young. The work is divided into a theoretical and practical parts. The theoretical part at first deals with lexis in general and then briefly presents word formation and vocabulary enrichment. The following chapter discusses structures of the national language, which was also a base for the practical part as the questionnaire contained a task proving knowledge of literary expressions. The questionnaire as a whole deals with issues of standard and non-standard levels of Czech. The last chapter of the theoretical part covers the term "youth" and age limits of this social group. Special attention is then paid to features of young people's language. The practical part deals in detail with results shown in questionnaires prepared in regard to the topic of this bachelor thesis. It thoroughly compares results in each task both with the young and the old generations. Each task for the individual age categories of respondents is shown in the form of a chart. The last part of the work presents a tabular summary of success rates for each age group of respondents in particular tasks. In this work, I also decided to compare the results of my survey via questionnaires among secondary school students in a grammar school, a vocational school and a training school. The results concerning students of secondary technical and vocational schools are shown in the diagrams at the end of the practical part. There are also tables comparing the success rate in individual tasks with students of all the three types (grammar school - vocational school - training school) of secondary schools