Drug-related language in current speech in Baja California, Mexico

The influence of drug trafficking has been evident in Mexico's common speech. This study analyzes the dynamics that enable the terms and expressions of the drugs world to transfer from marginality to mainstream speech in the city of Mexicali, in the Mexican border with California. The work is based on a corpus formed by texts of local press, essays on drug traffiking, local literary text, blogs, and "narcocorridos" (songs about drug kingpins) and by interviews with people involved in the commerce and use of drugs. Out of more than five hundred terms obtained in the corpus, sixty terms were selected according to their frequency (high, low and specialized) to establish the level of awareness of this language on a stratified sample of people in Mexicali. This analysis constitutes a glimpse of some causal factors in the complex dynamics of dissemination of the drug-related language in the society of Mexicali.