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Gadet, F. & Paternostro, R., (2013) Un accent multiculturel en région parisienne ? Repères-DoRiF, [en ligne].
... Some researchers adopt the expression because of its notoriety, all the while distancing it by putting it within quotation marks (Lehka-Lemarchand 2011). Meanwhile, others reject it and propose alternatives, such as "working-class youth French" (Fagyal 2003) or "Parisian multicultural French" (Gadet and Paternostro 2013), or periphrases aimed at maximum explanation and ostensible rejection of naturalizing generalizations, such as: "language practices of young people mainly from immigrant and so-called 'working-class' social backgrounds, evolving in the city, in cultural and linguistic spaces characterised by plurality and mixing" (Auzanneau and Juillard 2012). The debate on the risk of homogenization and reification of a great variability of linguistic practices under the label "language", "accent", "variety" or "speaking" is still not closed. ...
... Le corpus MPF est issu du volet français d'un projet franco-britannique, soutenu par l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-09-FRBR-037-01). Il est dirigé par Françoise Gadet. VoirGadet & Paternostro (2013), pour une présentation générale. Site internet : http://mpfvitrine.modyco.fr. 3 Pour un aperçu plus complet nous renvoyons à. ...
Les cours de français langue étrangère privilégient l'apprentissage du standard comme étant le français par défaut, reléguant la langue ordinaire à l'apprentissage sur le tas alors même que l'accès aux réseaux vernaculaires se banalise et que de nouveaux besoins de communication s'imposent. Cet ouvrage s'interroge sur le rôle que la diversité des accents et les formes non standard peuvent jouer dans l'enseignement/apprentissage du français et sur la façon dont elles peuvent être intégrées à des activités didactiques visant à l'éveil à la variation et à la sensibilisation aux traits caractéristiques de la langue de tous les jours. L'analyse de l'intonation des parlers jeunes en région parisienne, souvent pointés du doigt comme symptôme d'un malaise social et source d'une dérive langagière, montre au contraire qu'ils constituent un observatoire privilégié pour l'observation de formes de langue ordinaire, favorisant l'expression d'une certaine connivence des locuteurs dans les interactions quotidiennes. Une étude de terrain menée à Genève, auprès d'apprenants du monde entier, permet alors de discuter de l'utilité de la transcription d'interactions authentiques entre jeunes illustrant une langue de "proximité". Dans une démarche de data driven learning, le "transcodage" aide les apprenants à se focaliser sur les traits mobilisés dans des échanges ordinaires et agit en tant que "loupe" sur la langue en contexte.
This paper reports on language practices in the city of Strasbourg, in a multi-ethnic working class neighbourhood. This provides a comparative setting to identify whether linguistic features are spreading between French cities. Data were collected from young speakers (16 to 21) using an ethnographic approach over a year. First, this paper will briefly review the literature on language variation research in France. Second, a comparison of vernacular features will be carried out, focusing on lexical innovations, indirect questions following the verb savoir (Gardner-Chloros and Secova, this issue), quotative systems (Cheshire and Secova, this issue) and discourse markers. Finally, the ethnographic data collected as part of this research will be used to consider how multi-ethnic working class neighbourhoods in France are connected with each other, and how language may be travelling between settings.
Over the last ten years or so, '(multi)ethnolects' – i.e. the language varieties of young immigrants – have attracted the attention of sociolinguists from several European countries. The most promising theoretical model (Auer 2003) distinguishes between primary, secondary and tertiary ethnolects, depending on whether the observed features appear in the speech of the immigrants themselves or if they are imitated by comedians and by youngsters without an immigrant background. The present contribution illustrates the dynamic nature of such 'ethnolectal' features in Swiss German in the light of Auer's model. Implications of our findings for a theory of sociophonetics are discussed, e.g. with regard to the sociolinguistic status of the involved variables (markers, indicators, stereotypes). Finally, it is pointed out that the realm of sociophonetic inquiry is shifting from the social characteristics of the language user towards different modes of language use.
1. The speech community La Courneuve, a town of about thirty-five thousand people, is one of the poorest peripheral urban areas of the French capital. Residents of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis where the town is located (Figure 1) had the lowest annual income of all areas of greater Paris in 1990 (Soulignac, 1993), a trend which, during the nineties, led to the "global impoverishment of the population" who now earn six to fifteen times less than residents of the wealthiest areas situated North-West of the capital (ORGECO, 2001). Between 30 to 38% of the active population (ages 25 to 49) are regularly out of work, 59% of them for a year or longer. The picture becomes even grimmer when considering that 23% of the town's population are younger than 14 years old, and almost as many are children of recent immigrants. Figure 1. The town of La Courneuve among the poorest working-class neighborhoods North of Paris (adapted from Soulignac 1993). 91 In: Selected papers from NWAV 32, Philadelphia, Working Papers in Linguistics, 10 (2), 2005, 91-104. The town is known from its housing projects, among them La Cité des Quatre-Mille, 'the housing project of Four-Thousand', home to the poorest urban poor of different ethnic origins. The majority, however, are of African origin, and primarily Muslim. La Cité became infamous during the violent racial riots which shook France in the 1980s, and its residents are still often depicted in sensationalist French and foreign press reports as involved in drug dealings, clashes with the police, col-lective rape, and even Islamic Jihad (Le Monde 3/10/1995; NYT, 10/16/2001). The youth living in such impoverished banlieues 'suburbs' in and around big cities in France also regularly make the headlines for 'invent-ing a new way of speaking French'. According to a series of news cov-erage, which has crystallized into a well-circumscribed stereotype since the late eighties (Fagyal, in press), these 'movers and shakers' of lan-guage change in French would be Beurs (verlan 1 for arabe 'Arabic'), i.e. male adolescents of North-African descent born in France. Besides being on the forefront of lexical innovation, these speakers are claimed to have a peculiar prosody which supposedly arises from "shifting the accent to a syllable other than the final [in the phrase]" (Cerquiglini 2001). This pattern would be handed down from rap music (Calvet 1994), and influence all adolescents.
This paper discusses a phenomenon that has recently been observed in areas with a large migrant population in European cities: the rise of new linguistic practices among adolescents in multiethnic contexts. The main grammatical characteristics that have been described for them are (1) phonological/phonetic and lexical influences from migrant languages and (2) morpho-syntactic reductions and simplifications. In this paper, I show that from a grammatical point of view, morpho-syntactic reductions are only part of the story. Using ‘Kiezdeutsch’ as an example, the German instance of such a youth language (which may be the one with most speakers), I discuss several phenomena that provide evidence for linguistic productivity and show that they evolve from a specific interplay of grammatical and pragmatic features that is typical for contact languages: grammatical reductions go hand-in-hand with productive elaborations that display a systematicity that can lead to the emergence of new constructions, indicating the innovative grammatical power of these multiethnolects.
In this study we investigate code-crossing and multilingualism among 13–14 year olds in three schools (five classes) in the northern French city of Lille, based on data elicited during one-to-one interviews as part of a broader study of adolescent language in the city. With regard to code-crossing the study focuses on the indicative evidence of acquisition of (dialectal) Arabic by adolescents of European or Metropolitan French family background, gleaned from a series of language tests. The results suggest that for subjects of Metropolitan French background, interethnic friendships, bolstered by playful use of the language of the Other, are the single most important factor in non-institutional acquisition of Dialectal Arabic. These findings receive a degree of confirmation from the professed familiarity with a variety of Rom in one class group. Cross-ethnic language acquisition does not, however, appear to correlate in any significant way with factors that may be said to frame the socio-cultural space (such as tastes in music and style of dress) in which these teenage informants were moving at the time of the fieldwork. With regard to multilingualism subjects were found to have had exposure to a variety of European and one West-African language (Wolof). On the evidence of the language tests, the largest ethnically defined minority group, the Maghrebians manifested a range of competence in Arabic, with apparently significant differences between subjects of Algerian and Moroccan extraction.
This article argues that naming linguistic practices “ethnolectal” is a praxis with ideological consequences that sociolinguists fail sufficiently to address. It suggests that a transformation of linguistic differences into ethnolect-codes quickly falls prey to homogenizing groups and their language use, obscures speakers' styling practices as well as the relations between “ethnolect” and standard language speakers. Furthermore, “ethnolect” as an analytical concept buttresses the idea that linguistic practices are caused by ethnicity, when it is more likely to assume language use is shaped by how speakers interpret prevailing representations of ethnicity and style their language use in relation to that. As an alternative, I argue that ethnolects be viewed as representations of particular ways of speaking that do not necessarily correspond to systematic linguistic practices. Sociolinguists therefore need to investigate how local and general perceptions of ways of speaking lead to specific styling practices, and integrate these into their descriptions. In addition, they need to be aware that their own work is social action as well, which requires taking into account the concerns of who gets labeled. This is illustrated with data from a case study showing how Belgian adolescents of Moroccan background resist an ethnolectal categorization of their routine Dutch.
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This study examines how intonation contours prevalent in a Parisian French urban youth vernacular (Conein and Gadet, 1998; Fagyal 2003, 2005) index sociolinguistic meanings for Parisian French listeners. In a web-based experiment, listeners placed recordings with stress patterns ranging from clearly penultimate (‘non-standard’) to clear phrase-final (‘standard’) in cities whose linguistic correctness they had previously evaluated. Stimuli with the most numerous and strongest cues to penultimate prominence were reliably identified with cities low in linguistic prestige. Sociolinguistic experience was shown to predict stimulus evaluations. The conclusions reached speak to the socio-indexicality of certain Parisian intonation contour types and the methodology used herein may lend itself to future studies of socially sensitive language variation.
Notre article porte sur le français de jeunes habitants de quartiers pluri-ethniques et multilingues de grandes villes françaises. Il présente la poursuite d'une approche exploratoire amorcée en 2005 par Jamin et Trimaille consistant à la base en un rapprochement d'études sociolinguistiques réalisées à Grenoble (Trimaille, 2003a) et en région parisienne (La Courneuve et Fontenay-sous-Bois, Jamin, 2005), mais qui s'élargira ici à Marseille (Gasquet-Cyrus, 2004). Nous proposerons que dans un contexte de relative uniformité du français urbain et de tendance convergente du ‘sud linguistique’ vers les normes plus neutres du français d'oïl (pour une variable au moins, la rétention/effacement du schwa), ce nivellement ne se fait pas seulement dans la direction du français décrit comme standard. Des formes non standard similaires sont en effet attestées dans plusieurs centres urbains géographiquement assez distants. Par un ensemble de données quantitatives et qualitatives issues des trois études mentionnées supra, nous proposons d'interpréter la présence dans les trois sites de recherche d'une de ces formes, la palatalisation/affrication des occlusives dentales et vélaires, comme l'indice d'un certain degré de ‘convergence dans la divergence’ par rapport au français standard. Nous nous intéresserons ici aux facteurs de diffusion de cette variante, et plus particulièrement aux rôles respectifs de la variation stylistique et des représentations sociolinguistiques.
In the multilingual centres of Northern Europe's major cities, new varieties of the host languages are emerging. While some analyse these 'multiethnolects' as youth styles, we take a variationist approach to an emerging 'Multicultural London English' (MLE), asking: (1) what features characterise MLE; (2) at what age(s) are they acquired; (3) is MLEvernacularised; and (4) when did MLE emerge, and what factors enabled this? We argue that innovations in the diphthongs and the quotative system are generated from the specific sociolinguistics of inner-city London, where at least half the population is undergoinggroup second-language acquisitionand where high linguistic diversity leads to a heterogeneous feature pool to select from. We look forincrementation(Labov 2001) in the acquisition of the features, but find this only for two 'global' changes, BE LIKE and goose-fronting, for which adolescents show the highest usage. Community-internal factors explain the age-related variation in the remaining features.
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