LEXICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF YOUTH SPEECH New era, new people, new identities, and new language. Language is one of the characteristics that make us different from other living beings. Globalization and fast technology development brought various changes in our lives while language suffered grand changes. Slang, anglicisms, vulgarisms, and euphemisms are features of youth speech and conversational language. Globalization influenced the standard language and the language of media. They are now rich with English words, loanwords, slang words, anglicisms, vulgarisms, and euphemisms that are as a characteristic of conversational language and should stay there. This paper will research which loanwords, slang, anglicisms, and English words youth use. Also, it investigates whether they use euphemism to sound less harsh, the usage of collocations, curses, vulgarisms, and whether abbreviations and emojis are part of the youth speech. Written conversations have been collected for the need of this research from social media (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Viber, Messenger). They were collected from students of the first and the second year of Integrated undergraduate and graduate university Class teacher study in Osijek, and the material consists of 86 written records from which lexical characteristic of youth speech are taken out and grouped into tables.