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■Chantal Tetreault
Department of Anthropology
Michigan State University
tetreau7@msu.edu
“What do you think about having
beauty marks on your—Hashek!”:
Innovative and Impolite Uses of an
Arabic Politeness Formula among
French Teenagers
This article addresses how French teenagers of North African (primarily Algerian) descent
transform the Arabic speech act Hashek through their nontraditional and innovative uses. In
French language interactions that involved adversarial teasing or public criticism of a peer,
Arab French teenagers used the politeness formula Hashek as a self-corrective to simultane-
ously facilitate and mitigate such irreverent behavior. In addition, teenagers used Hashek as
an other-corrective in order to publicly mark peers as inappropriate or rude. Thus both usages
of the term (self- and other-corrective) aid teenagers in achieving impolite, nondeferential
speech. In using Hashek to accomplish impolite speech, French-speaking teenagers of North
African background transform this traditional Arabic linguistic practice to suit the face-needs
of their adolescent peer group in France, while remaining in conversation with North African
interactional rituals and cultural norms. [politeness, adolescence, France, migration,
facework]
Introduction
This article addresses how French teenagers of North African (primarily Alge-
rian) descent transform the Arabic speech act Hashek through their nontradi-
tional and innovative uses.1The data addressed here were collected during
longitudinal ethnographic research (1999–2000, 2006, and 2011) with Arab French
teenagers in Chemin de l’Ile, a neighborhood located 15 kilometers west of Paris,
comprised of mostly low-income housing projects (les cités). In French language
interactions that involved adversarial teasing or public criticism of a peer, Arab
French teenagers used the politeness formula Hashek as a self-corrective to simulta-
neously facilitate and mitigate such irreverent behavior. In addition, teenagers used
Hashek as an other-corrective in order to publicly mark peers as being inappropriate
or rude. Thus both usages of the term (self- and other- corrective) aid teenagers in
achieving impolite, nondeferential speech. I argue that in using Hashek to accomplish
impolite speech, French-speaking teenagers of North African background transform
this traditional Arabic linguistic practice to suit the face-needs of their adolescent
peer group in France, while remaining in reflexive conversation with North African
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Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 25, Issue 3, pp. 285–302, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395. © 2015
by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12098.
285
interactional rituals and cultural norms. In so doing,adolescents actively negotiate a
set of shifting stances in relation to an emergent code of behavior they call le respect or
“respect,” that involves their complicated positioning between teenaged irreverence
and cultural continuity in the context of diaspora.
Hashek bears a striking similarity to what Garrett (2005) defines as a “code-specific
genre,” that is, a speech act that has to be uttered in a specific language in order for
its pragmatic force to be achieved. When speaking French, teenagers of NorthAfrican
descent retained Hashek in Arabic as a means to facilitate face-threatening teasing, and
thus its power to mitigate face threats seems to be linked to its status as an Arabic
politeness formula. And yet, by using Hashek in French-language interactions to
facilitate and achieve the public teasing and insulting of their peers, teenagers shift the
occasions for use as well as the pragmatic force usually associated with the term in
Arabic interactions. So, unlike code-specific genres, the communicative value of
Hashek is clearly not founded upon its uniformity as an Arabic speech act. The shift
that Hashek undergoes as a code-specific genre imported into a teenaged French-
language matrix begs the question—how does it manage to simultaneously diverge
from and retain similarity to the adult Arabic-language Hashek?
I argue that the pragmatic malleability of Hashek is centrally linked to teenagers’
emergent facework practices. Specifically, when they import theArabic term into their
peer, French-language interactions, they are engaging in a pragmatic shift in stance that
is distinct from their parents’ deferential usage. The term’s multiple meanings and uses
hinge upon several interactive contingencies that are motivated by speakers’ native
language, age, generation, and migration history. Hashek usage in French interactions
among Arab French teenagers thereby emphasizes the interactive and changing nature
of verbal genres and linguistic codes (here, Arabic and French) as well as the way that
discourse practices map onto generational stances and lived experiences.
Further, such an emphasis on the multiple uses and interpretations of Hashek leads
to complex questions regarding the linkages not only between genres and codes, but
also between politeness, facework, and stance. In Chemin de l’Ile, as elsewhere, both
codes and their speakers come to embody ideological stances and meta-pragmatic
stereotypes, that is, beliefs or ideologies about language use and linguistic practice that
are central to interpretations of these speech events (Rampton 1995; Silverstein 1976;
Urciuoli 1996; Woolard 1998). Thus, code-specific genres such as Hashek become locally
meaningful in relation not only to a speaker’s social identity, but also in relation to
larger reflexive processes in which meta-pragmatic stereotypes about language come
to encompass identity categories and representations beyond the interaction, such as
age, migration, and politeness (Agha 2007). In turn, these meta-pragmatic stereotypes
inform not only linguistic practices, such as Hashek use among teenagers in French
interactions, but also speakers’ everyday interpretations of those practices.
I argue that the discursive reflexivity apparent here in teenagers’ Hashek use points
to a larger type of cultural reflexivity relating to transcultural practices and age-specific
stances toward politeness. Here, I extend Cuban anthropologist and ethnomusicolo-
gist Fernando Ortiz’s (1947) notion of transculturation to describe how cultures con-
verge. Ortiz argued that when cultures combine, such as Spanish and African in the
Cuban context, they potentially surmount differences, and even conflicts, to forge
something new and transcendent. My use of transculturality differs from Ortiz’s, in that
instead of viewing the combination of practices and beliefs from two groups as
necessarily transcendent, I focus on the ways that French teenagers of Algerian descent
forge transcultural identities through the simultaneous creation and counter-opposition
of social identities such as self and other, teen and parent, French-born and immigrant-
born, as well as cultural Frenchness and Arabness (cf. Woolard 1998 on simultaneity).
Thus my use of transcultural refers to how Arab French teenagers experience and
express migration and diaspora in ways that are related to the experiences of their
parents, but that are also innovative, bifurcated, and differential.2That is, in les cités,
Arab French teenagers combine cultural and linguistic referents in their communica-
tive styles in ways that serve to both deconstruct and reimagine the ideological
286 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
underpinnings of their multiple social identities. I argue that the linguistically and
culturally transformative facework practices exhibited by teenagers’ innovative uses of
Hashek demonstrate their creative responses to the hierarchical system of deference
that teenagers call le respect or “respect,” a concept to which I will return below.
This analysis aligns with an increasing focus in scholarship on language socializa-
tion on how youth and children become “competent participants of their [peer] social
group” through language use (Goodwin and Kyratzis 2011:366). Research documents
teenagers employing a wide variety of discourse practices in order to socialize peers
into innovative social worlds, including gossip (Mendoza-Denton 2008; Shuman
1986, 1992), ritualized insults (Mendoza-Denton 2008; Tetreault 2009b, 2010), and
communicative styles including language and clothing (Bucholtz 1999, 2011; Eckert
1989, 2003; Keim 2008; Rampton 2003; Shankar 2008). At the same time, such schol-
arship also illustrates the ways that youth social worlds are fashioned, at least in part,
in response to widely circulating ideological discourses regarding generational,
gendered, classed, ethnicized, and racialized social identities. Similarly, French socio-
linguistic literature on immigrant descent populations addresses the creativity of
youth language, but also the ways that teenagers are socialized into language prac-
tices and ideologies that consolidate hierarchies of socioeconomic class, gendered,
racialized, and spatialized identities, and differential language status (Abu-Haidar
1995; Basier and Bachmann 1984; Billiez 1985; Boucherit 2008; Boyer 1994, 1997;
Dabène 1991; Dabène and Billiez 1987; Dannequin 1999; Goudaillier 2012; Moïse
2003). The present article attempts contribute to both of these perspectives, by ana-
lyzing the push and pull of cultural innovation and constraint present in French Arab
teenagers’ emergent facework norms.
Recent Theoretical Frameworks for Politeness and Facework
The process whereby adolescents transform Hashek from a term of “formal polite-
ness” into a means of facilitating face-threatening acts demonstrates the general
complexity of politeness and the challenges inherent to its study (Mills 2003:8–9).
Here I follow Mills’s (2003:14) convention of using formal politeness “to refer to those
ritualized phrases such as “please” and “thank you” which most people recognize as
polite.” At the same time, also in line with Mills, my analysis questions whether these
phrases are “always interpreted or indeed are always intended to function as indica-
tors of politeness” (2003:14). Politeness was originally conceived by Brown and
Levinson (1987) as the management of social “face” or positive presentation of self in
social interaction (Goffman 1982)—and more specifically as the mitigation of “face-
threatening acts” or FTAs (Agha 1994; Arundale 1999; Locher and Watts 2005).
However, critics charge that, despite the impressive conceptual elegance and scope of
Brown and Levinson’s theory, many difficulties remain unresolved with regard to its
ability to explain politeness as an interpretive process that is socially constructed and
emergent in interaction (Arundale 2006; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2009, 2010; Holmes
1995; Irvine 1992; Keating 1998; Mills 2003; Pagliai 2010). As Mills (2003:9) argues,
“politeness cannot be understood simply as a property of utterances, or even as a set
of choices made by individuals, but rather as a set of practices or strategies which
communities of practice develop, affirm, and contest.”
Current models of politeness thus focus on the complexities of facework, which is
not seen as necessarily accomplishing perfect equilibrium (Arundale 2005, 2006).
Reformulations of facework provide a promising avenue for exploring the usefulness
of Hashek to teenaged peer interactions, but only if facework is understood as sur-
passing the mere mitigation of face-threatening acts, as scholars have argued
(Arundale 1999, 2005, 2006; Haugh 2007; Locher and Watts 2005). Building upon
Schegloff (1988), Arundale (2006) notes that such “rule following explanations” for
facework and interaction are generally ineffective for explaining how participants
manage the variety of possibilities and contingencies that arise in everyday commu-
nication. Specifically, Arundale’s (2005:59) interactionally achieved politeness model
“What do you think about having beauty marks on your—Hashek!” 287
analyzes how “each participant’s cognitive processes in interpreting and designing
are responsive to prior, current, or potential contributions the other participants make
to the stream of interaction.”
Others working on politeness such as Locher and Watts (2005:14) argue for the
expansion of the notion of “facework” beyond mere mitigation toward a broader
framework that encompasses “relational work” as both polite and “non-polite, yet
appropriate/politic behavior.” For example, in exchanges such as a heated family
discussion, “bald on-record” (direct, unmitigated) face-threats might be taken to be
frank and genuine talk, rather than as a breech of politeness. Locher and Watts’s
(2005:11) model thus accounts for those moments when speakers are not “oriented to
the maintenance of harmony, cooperation, and social equilibrium” and yet are accom-
plishing important interactional work.
Still others, such as Agha (2007) and Mills (2003), focus on polite forms as linguistic
resources that entail attendant cultural norms; such norms invite, rather than pre-
clude, speakers’ strategic use and even manipulation of these forms. That is, formal
politeness and other “stereotypically ‘social’ uses of language . . . depend in a funda-
mental way on widely shared, ideological models of language use” (Agha 2007:38).
Speakers’ access to these ideological models invites critical assessment or “reflexiv-
ity” and thus, the strategic use of such forms (Agha 2007:38) and the reflexivity that
attends it (Agha 2007:25). For example, building upon Friedrich (1986), Agha
(2007:33) notes that the existence of such knowledge by speakers allows for the
possibility that “polite language is used as a form of veiled aggression.”
I argue that adolescents use Hashek as a central resource for constructing and
enacting innovative facework norms within their peer group that entail the negotia-
tion of both “unmarked” forms of interaction as well as highly salient (that is,
heightened or intense) interactional moments—mocking, teasing, and public rebuke
of another—that are not without risk. For these reasons, I retain the term “facework”
even while I argue for its expansion.
Following Arundale (2005) and Agha (2007), I demonstrate that Hashek affords
adolescents the ability to actively shape their listener’s response to face-threatening
talk and thus a means for “shaping [the] interlocutor’s next-turn behavior” (Agha
2007:35). The data that I explore in this article therefore demonstrate not only how
adolescents elaborate innovative facework norms within their peer group, but also the
mutable yet norm-mediated quality of facework more generally (Agha 2005). Hashek
use among French teenagers indicates that the interactional meanings of even
so-called “politeness formulas” emerge in tandem with the articulation of meta-
pragmatic stereotypes about speakers, in this case, the juxtaposition of youthful
French identities with those of their “traditional” Arabic-speaking immigrant
parents. Teenagers’ transformation of this politeness formula is wholly dependent
upon how emergent and local meanings of Hashek among teenagers coexist, comple-
ment, and even clash with the more broadly codified forms of Hashek that native
Arabic speakers access, and, more important, with the particular kinds of politeness
that their immigrant parents achieve with this Arabic term.
Ethnographic Contexts for Hashek
The data analyzed in this article were collected during the course of a larger ethno-
graphic project on language practices and social identity among French adolescents of
primarilyAlgerian descent. Data were audio-recorded in over 140 hours of naturalistic
interaction, collected among roughly 60 young teenagers, aged 13–16, in semi- and
noninstitutional contexts such as neighborhood associations and local outdoor play-
grounds. Extensive ethnographic research (1999 to 2000) and follow-up research (2006
and 2011) were conducted in Chemin de l’Ile, a neighborhood located 15 kilometers
west of Paris in the town of Nanterre. Central to France’s industrial boom in the 1950s
and 1960s, Nanterre has had a long history with immigration generally, and with
Algerian immigration in particular. Male Algerian workers, among them several
288 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
grandfathers of adolescents in this study, were recruited by factories in Nanterre and
lived in bidonvilles (shantytowns), located about a mile away from Chemin de l’Ile.
Most of the adolescents involved in this study were culturally located between what
the French refer to as “second” and “third” generations, in that at least one of their
parents was born and raised until adulthood in North Africa. Unlike their parents, who
were by and large all fluent Arabic speakers, the adolescents in this study possessed
highly variable competence in colloquial North African Arabic, with some teenagers
having attained relative fluency through home use and some having only passive
knowledge. Due to their varied competence in Arabic (there were very few Tamazight/
Kabyle speakers in the neighborhood), adolescents tended to speak French with one
another while incorporating Arabic loan words, Hashek being just one example.
When I asked my young informants what the Arabic term meant, teenagers trans-
lated Hashek into French as je te taquine (“I’m teasing you”) or je blague (“I’m joking”).
In contrast, the native Arabic-speaking parents of adolescents in my study translated
Hashek into French as mes excuses (“excuse me”). In parents’ usage, the term fulfilled
the basic function of a politeness formula, typically used across North Africa to create
polite deference for an interlocutor when speaking to other adults in Arabic. When I
asked adults in the community about the discrepancy between their own and teen-
agers’ uses of Hashek, they often laughingly dismissed young people’s practice as
either incorrect (“not real”) Arabic or derisively as a “kids’ thing,” indicating its
nonserious nature.
In addition to differences in code choice, teenagers’ facework norms among their
peers are distinct from their parents’ and from those that seen in teenagers’ commu-
nication in intergenerational interactions, which are particularly subject to le respect.
Le respect is a set of behaviors that my teenaged informants construct as commensu-
rate with proper cultural and religious practices.3Le respect is not just a reproduction
of Arab-Muslim values that are imported wholesale from North Africa but a set of
moral discourses and practices that emerge in France, and particularly in the stigma-
tized spaces of French cités and are central to the experience of being Muslim and
Arab within a diasporic context. Adolescents in Chemin de l’Ile interpret le respect as
a social code that prescribes adherence to behavioral standards including showing
deference for one’s elders. Its local practice is loosely based upon an age and gender
hierarchy typical of North African and Arab culture more generally (Abu-Lughod
1986). As Abu-Lughod (1986:81) notes, among Arab Bedouins a similar social hier-
archy is modeled on a vision of the family in which those who are socially powerful
have responsibilities to protect those who are socially weak. Similarly, in Chemin de
l’Ile le respect involves the expectation that the less powerful will be protected by the
more powerful. For example, as Salima, a 12-year-old girl, explained to me,
“Muslims, they don’t hit. We Muslims—the men—those they respect the most, it’s the
old men, the women, and the children. You can’t hit women. You can’t raise a hand
against them.”4
In Salima’s depiction, “respect” is constructed both relationally and hierarchically;
old men are the most respected, followed by women and children. Instead of exclu-
sively depending upon others to receive le respect, adult men supposedly hold the
power to confer it upon others; they are expected to give respect to those who are
more socially vulnerable than they, namely, elderly men, women, and children. Thus,
at least on an ideological level, the power to give respect to others (thereby marking
them as socially vulnerable or weak) is a power that is unevenly distributed; men
purportedly hold more power to give or withhold respect than women, just as
middle-aged adults of both genders can give or withhold respect from the young or
the elderly. And yet, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Tetreault 2009a) and as I will
demonstrate below, teenaged girls like Salima often challenge conservative genera-
tional and gender norms in practice at the same time that they reproduce these ideas
discursively. Adolescents thereby engage in an interesting combination of resistance
and accommodation to their parents’ morality and both reproduce and subvert nor-
mative notions of le respect.
“What do you think about having beauty marks on your—Hashek!” 289
Conventional Uses of Hashek in Arabic and Nonconventional Uses in French
In this section, I broadly delineate norms for codified usage of Hashek through a
discussion of scholarly accounts and my own ethnographic observations. In doing so,
I describe some of the ideologically normative associations concurrent with conven-
tional use of the term by native speakers of North African Arabic.5The term Hashek is
conventionally used by North African Arabic speakers as a self-corrective when
mentioning matters relating to a restricted set of topics that generally includes pros-
titutes, dogs, donkeys, and defecation. Kapchan (1996:274) translates Hashek from
Moroccan Arabic as “forgive me for mentioning it” and notes that it is spoken “after
all words that connote dirt and contagion.” Further, Kapchan (1996:274) notes that
Hashek offers speakers the temporary polite containment of those categories that
“inhabit a field of ambiguity . . . they are domesticated, yet still somewhat embar-
rassing in their public display of sexual behavior.” Similarly, Bourdieu (1966:224)
claims that Hashek is used in Algeria as a means to achieve modesty in the wake of
topics that purportedly hold the power to threaten the honor of the addressee, such
as “the category of women.” More recent evidence indicates that even conventional
uses of Hashek in North Africa are subject to social and cultural change. According to
my Moroccan research consultant Amina Saadaoui, in 2009 a common use of Hashek
among young, urban Moroccans included instances of mentioning Jews or Israel. This
type of use in North Africa, (I never heard it used this way in France), shows that
Hashek continues to function pragmatically to create deference and to repair in the
wake of any mention of a social category or topic deemed potentially offensive. Its
contexts of use therefore change according to shifting political and moral landscapes.
A majority of the parents of adolescents who took part in my study were native
speakers of an Arabic dialect from western Algeria, an area that closely borders
Morocco. When speaking Arabic, their usage of Hashek corresponded to the patterns
of codified usage that Bourdieu, Kapchan, and Saadaoui describe. Furthermore,
native Arabic speaking adults in Chemin de l’Ile did not use Hashek when speaking
French, as their children did. Below, I explore in detail the contrasting uses of Hashek
in French by the French-born adolescents in my study to a) facilitate rather than
mitigate face-threatening utterances and b) as an other-corrective to mark a peer’s
previous utterance as inappropriate or disrespectful.
Teenagers’ Self-Corrective Uses of Hashek
In this section, I analyze two examples of teenagers using Hashek as a self-corrective.
Both examples are taken from an extended performance during which teenaged boys
(Tarek, Salim, and Ali) appropriated my microphone and audio recorder for their
own purposes, mimicking the voice of an “MC” in order to mock a nearby girl, Sarah.
Here Hashek is used as a resource to facilitate these socially risky actions that vacillate
between play and potential insult.6The first example below involves public teasing. In
the boys’ performance, Hashek is used to recast racially stereotyped mocking—
potentially face-threatening behavior—as merely playful teasing or joking. A main
feature of this performance is the creation of stylized voicing (mock “Chinese”) that
the three boys use to mimic Sarah, who is of Cambodian and French heritage,
French-born, and a native French speaker like the boys of Algerian descent who tease
her.7Similarly to Salim and Ali, Tarek adds his own imitation of Sarah, but chooses to
attribute his voicing of supposedly “Chinese” speech directly to her in turn 3 (“it’s
Sarah”). Just afterward, seemingly as a means to recast his explicit mocking of Sarah
as play rather than insult, Tarek utters Hashek.
Some ethnographic background to the participants in this exchange is relevant to
my interpretation of it. Sarah, although French of Cambodian and French heritage,
lived with her brother and sister with an Arabic-speaking foster family of Algerian
origin. She did not speak Arabic herself, but was conversant with the many Arabic
loan words (such as Hashek) that characterized everyday teenaged speech in the
290 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
neighborhood. As well, even though antagonism is certainly part of the exchange,
another relevant dynamic is clearly social intimacy. Among their peers, Salim was
known to be “dating” Sarah, a fairly innocent endeavor since both teenagers were
sexually inactive at the time, but clearly indicated his affection for her.
Example 1 : Hashek as self-correction to facilitate mocking a peer8
1 Salim Nanagaga. Hé il faut parler en chinon
(“chinoise”). Nanagaga
Nanagaga. Hey we have to talk in
Chinese. Nanagaga
Nananghaha Nananghaha Nananghaha
Nananghaha!
Nananghaha Nananghaha
Nananghaha Nananghaha!
2 Ali Ching chang chong ching! Ching chang chong ching!
3 Tarek Nanagaga Nananghaha aiaiaiaiaiaiaiai,
c’est Sarah. Hashek!
Nanagaga Nananghaha aiaiaiaiaiaiaiai,
it’s Sarah. Hashek!
(laughing, looking directly at Sarah)
The above excerpt demonstrates innovative usage of Hashek both semantically
and interactionally. Tarek’s use of Hashek clearly deviates from conventional
deferential uses relative to a set of culturally codified semantic categories that
might offend due to their power to morally contaminate (Kapchan 1996). Rather, he
uses Hashek to contain the potential insult of an idiosyncratic instance of
offensive speech (mock Chinese), explicitly racist depictions of Asians and, more
important, of a racist depiction of a particular Asian person who is present,
Sarah.
Although Sarah’s verbal response was unfortunately uttered out of my micro-
phone’s range, she showed no apparent anger despite Tarek’s public teasing. Inas-
much as the potential for insult is thus contained or mitigated by Hashek, Tarek’s
use of the term facilitates his voicing of stereotyping or racializing speech about
Asians generally and about Sarah in particular and to achieve their French (that is,
French-born and French-speaking) teenaged interactional goals of using racially ste-
reotyping speech in order to tease and even flirt. Much as in the United States,
racist discourse about Asians is a fixture within French society (Chun 2009; Hill
1998) and is also considered illicit and offensive speech. Here, Tarek uses an Arabic
resource to facilitate his strategic use of such discourse and also to contain the insult
that such racist speech might incite. His use of Hashek can also be considered stra-
tegic in that this exchange was part of an extended series of public insults, initiated
by Tarek and orchestrated primarily by him with my microphone. Tarek was a
gifted verbal provocateur (much more so than either Salim or Ali) and may be
using Hashek in order to extend and soften his performance of insults, as I may have
have taken back my microphone if he had not framed his performance as
nonserious. Indeed, it is Tarek who continues the performance of public teasing
using my microphone in the next example and who again uses Hashek to facilitate
doing so.
In these ways, the above usage is innovative not only at the semantic level, but also
at a strategic interactional level. Whereas Hashek is generally used in traditional North
African Arabic exchanges to create deference for the listener, in mocking Sarah, Tarek
is expressly not engaging in deferential treatment of his peer, but rather in irreverent
and even potentially confrontational if playful speech. Tarek’s usage therefore per-
fectly reproduces the prevalent teen “folk” translation of Hashek as je blaguais (“I was
joking/teasing).
Performances in which teenagers appropriated my microphone often involved
mimicking a French television show host, a persona that speakers sometimes embod-
ied by asking present peers bogus interview questions in order to embed mocking
speech (Tetreault 2009b). In a continuation of the interaction analyzed in the previous
example, Tarek uses the guise of the “public opinion interview” to mock nearby Ali,
a younger boy of 13, by asking Sarah, “What do you think about the stinky breath of
“What do you think about having beauty marks on your—Hashek!” 291
Ali Naifeh?” (turn 1). As part of his performance of the TV host persona, Tarek uses
formal, polite language, such as the pronoun vous to specifically address Sarah, which
he would not otherwise use to address his peer. As in the previous excerpt, Tarek and
Salim vie for my microphone as a means to discredit or embarrass nearby peers. In
turn 4, Tarek directs another bogus “personal opinion” interview question to Sarah,
with a seemingly innocuous inquiry about her thoughts on “beauty marks.” The
question is actually far from innocent, however, since Sarah’s face bears several large,
dark birthmarks. And yet, Tarek never directly mentions Sarah or Sarah’s face but
rather inserts Hashek in the “slot” where the location of the aforementioned beauty
marks would normally be uttered.
Example 2 : Hashek as self-correction to shift responsibility for impoliteness
1 Tarek Que pensez-vous des coups d’haleine de
Ali Naifeh?
What do you (formal/plural) think about
the stinky breath of Ali Naifeh?
2 Sarah Pas de commentaire. No comment.
3 Salem Ça pue! It stinks!
4 Tarek Que pensez-vous- que pensez-vous
des grains de beauté sur la—Hashek!
What do you (formal/pl.) think- what do
you (formal/pl.) think about having
beauty marks on the/your—Hashek!
In the above example, Tarek employs Hashek in another innovative fashion,
namely, to correct an incomplete utterance and an inferred rather than a spoken
word. Whereas normative Hashek use in Arabic either directly precedes or follows
the utterance of a particular word or semantic category that is socially recognizable
as potentially offensive, Tarek’s usage involves a preemptive aspect, that is, to
replace the potentially insulting or offensive word entirely. Although not uttered,
several clues point to the potentially face-threatening message that Tarek intended.
First, the topical focus of the sentence, “beauty marks,” clearly invites the listener to
anticipate a reference to body parts. Second, the fact that Tarek directs his question
to Sarah and the presence of birthmarks on her face topicalizes that body part.
Finally, it is quite telling that although Tarek stops short of uttering the word in
question, he includes the feminine article, la, which can be used in the beginning of
a French possessive construction in which “your” is formed using the definite
articles (la, le, and les) of the object possessed. In this particular case, this further
contributes to the ambiguity of Tarek’s words since the feminine “la” could refer
either to la figure (a polite term for face) or, more likely given the context of peer
interaction, la gueule, a much less polite slang French word for “face.” La gueule,
which literally denotes an animal’s snout or muzzle, roughly translates as “mug”
and is clearly offensive.
In addition to skirting the potential offensiveness of uttering “mug” or gueule,
leaving the term unspoken may indicate Tarek’s desire to have the listener consider
even more insulting or vulgar body parts where “beauty marks” might appear on
Sarah’s body, such as la poitrine (chest or breasts) or la chatte (female cat, colloquial for
vagina). Earlier in the recording one of the girls present, Zahira, admonished Tarek,
“Pas de gros mots” (“No bad words”), ostensibly in an attempt to keep the exchange
relatively civil, perhaps for me, the researcher, as well as for my audio recorder.
Tarek’s use of Hashek to replace a missing word might be interpreted as an attempt at
circumventing this admonishment. In this way, the use of Hashek needs to be consid-
ered in the context of the interactional frame in that there is precedent for avoiding
“bad words.”
As in the previous example, Hashek works as a correction, that is, to recast
Tarek’s irreverent talk about Sarah’s appearance as playful joking rather than insult-
ing. However, despite the ostensible use of Hashek to lessen the face-threatening
discursive force of the unsaid word, its presence evokes what is unsaid by causing
listeners to be responsible for “filling in the blank” and thereby imagining the illicit
292 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
reference, whether that be Sarah’s gueule or something else. This has complex impli-
cations for speaker authorship and responsibility (Goffman 1981; Hill and Irvine
1993). Tarek’s use of Hashek has the potential to deflect authorship of the “bad
word” to his audience and, in so doing, to shift responsibility for his irreverent
stance toward Sarah to his audience. Hashek here serves as a strategic means to
potentially facilitate the co-construction of a face-threatening act by audience
members in addition to recasting the partially spoken utterance as playful
teasing.
In sum, self-corrective uses of Hashek in French are central to adolescents’ teasing
rituals in that they allow teenagers to actively negotiate the boundary between play
and insult on a moment to moment basis (cf. Eder 1995; Irvine 1992; Kochman 1983;
Rampton 1995; Tetreault 2010). As Lampert and Ervin-Tripp (2006) as well as others
note, risky teasing is often used to establish rapport among friends and consolidate
intimacy.9I argue that Hashek is a central resource for teenagers to appeal to the
values of solidarity and intimacy, rather than deference and social distance, in that
it facilitates risky teasing of peers. In so doing, adolescents established a shared
orientation to irreverence within their peer group in contrast to the (projected) nor-
mative orientation toward deference that Hashek indexed in their parents’ Arabic
language interactions.
These unconventional uses of Hashek for self-correction in French demonstrate
that adolescents reflexively construct interactional norms for their peer group in
transcultural conversation with the norms of their parents and more generally, and
with the norms of native Arabic speakers and more specifically immigrants from
the bled (home country). In French-based self-corrective uses of Hashek, adolescents
rely upon the meta-pragmatic associations of Hashek with the deferential stances of
polite, adult Arabic speakers such as parents. These meta-pragmatic projections
inform speakers’ reflexive understandings of normative use and thereby facilitate
adolescents’ irreverent uses of the term.
Teens’ Other-Corrective Uses of Hashek
The reflexively transcultural aspect of facework that I have outlined thus far takes on
further complexity when considering adolescents’ uses of Hashek that depart from
conventional uses in that they are other-corrections of a peer made in front of an
audience. Rather than mitigating the potentially threatening force of a teenager’s
own words, other-corrective uses of Hashek most often publicly recast a peer’s
words as rude or immodest. In contrast to the ubiquitous use of Hashek as an other-
corrective among French-speaking teens in my fieldsite, this practice also does not
appear to be common in peer-based Arabic language interactions, based upon
opportunistic sampling of North African Arabic speakers in both Chemin de l’Ile
and Morocco conducted by me and my Moroccan research assistant, Amina
Saadaoui. However, according to our sample there is precedent for Hashek as an
other-corrective in parent-child North African Arabic language interactions. In these
cases, a parent may use Hashek as a corrective for an impolite or inappropriate
utterance to a child even without an audience since the putative interactional goal
is to inculcate the child into polite behavior rather than to publicly mark the child
as impolite. Furthermore, in contrast to the pattern of using Hashek as a self-
corrective to flout culturally respectful behavior, when using the term for other-
correction, adolescents sometimes specifically used the term to mark a peer as
impolitely infringing upon cultural values of le respect. In these ways adolescents’
uses of Hashek seem to indicate dual processes of transcultural innovation and
continuity.
Below, I address two instances of teens using Hashek to correct another speaker.
The first excerpt, Example 3, shows an instance in which Hashek is used by a teenager,
Cécile, to mark my behavior as inappropriate and to protect her own face in front of
an audience of peers. All of the adolescent participants in this exchange were fifteen
“What do you think about having beauty marks on your—Hashek!” 293
years old at the time of the recording. As with the other examples, the exchange was
recorded in the neighborhood association Cerise. Just before the exchange, the three
adolescents and I were sitting on the floor in a small room of the association and
chatting in a relaxed moment of socializing during a school vacation. In this example,
the offense occurred when I observed that Cécile is grande, a word that means either
“tall” or “big,” depending on the referent. When referring to individuals and not
objects, the term conventionally means “tall” or “grown up.” However, in the follow-
ing example, the term appears to take on ambiguity and the nonconventional
meaning of “fat.”
Example 3 : Hashek as other-correction to mark impoliteness
1 Chantal Maigrie un petit peu? Lost some weight?
2 Cécile Oui.Hé, j’ai de ces petites
jambes!
Yes. Hey, I have such little legs! (to the group,
smiling)
3 Chantal Hein? What?
4 Cécile De ces petites jambes. Such little legs. (triumphant, bragging tone)
5 Pierre T’as vu comment elle est
grande et elle ose dire ça!
You see how big she is and she dares to say that!
(smiling, incredulous but admiringly)
6 Cécile Hé, franchement, Mina,
[[ça fait pas petit?
Hey, really, Mina, [[that doesn’t look small?
(smiling, pointing to her thigh, in a jubilant tone)
7 Pierre [[Mais elle est malade,
cette fille!
[[Oh this girl is crazy! (in an appre-
ciative tone)
8Silence [2.0 seconds]
9 Chantal Parce que t’es grande
aussi de là à là.
Because you are big/tall also from here to here.
(earnest tone, pointing to my feet and head)
10 Cécile Ouais ouais. Yeah yeah. (In a disheartened, fatigued tone,
looking downward.)
11 Silence [2.0 seconds]
12 Chantal [laughs]
13 Cécile Hashek! Hashek! (eyes staring at Chantal, spoken in a hurt,
aggravated tone) (awkward silence for 3 seconds is
followed by a change in topic, initiated by Mina)
The excerpt begins when I ask Cécile if she had lost weight, normally a very
appropriate line of questioning in France in same-sex company, but here a potential
face-threatening act because I asked the question in front of a male teenaged peer,
Pierre. Doing so potentially infringes upon le respect through a discussion of
Cécile’s body in mixed-gender company, a topic which would normally be avoided
by Arab French teenagers in such a context. In response to my question about
Cécile’s weight, she defers by claiming to have such “little” legs, although she in
fact had a strong and solidly built physique. Mimicking Cécile’s joking tone, Pierre
incredulously notes that she is actually quite grande (tall/big), introducing the pos-
sible nonconventional interpretation that she is actually “big/fat” and not “little,” as
she claims. I compound the ambiguity as well as the potentially face-threatening
discussion by clarifying that she is grande (“tall”) in height along with gesturing
from my own head to my feet. Although Cécile agrees with my comment, an
awkward silence ensues, and I laugh nervously, realizing my series of gaffes: I have
been speaking about her body in front of a male peer and in ways that could be
interpreted as disrespectful and as indicating that Cécile was “fat/big” and not just
“tall/big.”
The above example is indicative of a pattern of other-correction typical among
teens in Chemin de l’Ile, specifically, of marking a fellow peer as rude in the wake of
294 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
a perceived face threat. In this case, while I am not technically a peer, my standing as
a cultural novice and nonnative French speaker makes me vulnerable to a type of
correction that adolescents usually reserve for one another. At one level of interpre-
tation, the exchange appears to be a case of Cécile using Hashek to reprimand me for
speaking about her body in front of a male peer.
However, at another level, the example more specifically indicates Cécile’s cor-
rection of my laughter, which occurs directly before Hashek, and which she may be
interpreting as disrespectful. The general tone of the exchange is initially playful,
but breaks down in response to my continued gaffes and inability to maintain a
joking tone. For example, Cécile initially accepts her peer, Pierre, teasing her in the
wake of my calling attention to her weight. When Cécile initially dissimulates any
potential awkwardness by joking that she has “such little legs,” Pierre apprecia-
tively jokes back by laughingly countering she is “tall/big” (turn 5) and also
“crazy” (turn 7).
In contrast, my own disfluent contributions initiate trouble. I am unable to either
hear or interpret Cécile’s comment in turn 3 (Hein? or What?). Then after a long pause
(turn 8), instead of joining in the joking I take on a serious tack to claim that Cécile is
“tall” in turn 9, which misfires as perhaps too earnest or too belabored, given Cécile’s
disheartened response, “yeah, yeah.” Finally, after another long, awkward pause I
laugh nervously in the wake of realizing that my commentary may have been disre-
spectful given the mixed company as well as the implication that we are potentially
inferring that Cécile is “fat” and not just “tall/big.” Cécile, with a serious look on her
face and a hurt tone, seems to interpret my laughter as insult in itself, and responds
“Hashek” in turn 13.
Aside from this impressive series of gaffes on my part, the exchange provides a
unique view into teens’ reappropriation of Hashek for their own innovative interac-
tional purposes. As such, the example demonstrates an inversion of the term’s origi-
nal usage and meaning as a so-called “politeness formula” in that Cécile uses Hashek
in order to mark me and my behavior as impolite and inappropriate. Furthermore,
Cécile uses Hashek in order to forward an interpretation of behavior that she deter-
mines to be inappropriate as a personal affront rather than a ritualized affront in the
wake of a particular semantic category.
This example demonstrates that teens are not using Hashek to correct another
speaker for sexual impropriety, playful irreverence, or even social awkwardness, but
for imputed hostile aggression or negative intentions. Here, the pragmatic force of
Hashek departs significantly from Arabic speakers’ use of the term to create modest
deference in the wake of immodest subjects. Norms for teenaged peer facework are
being brokered that validate joking and irreverence as appropriate as long as such talk
is not intended to be hostile or mean-spirited. When I laugh, it seems that Cécile
believes that I am laughing at her. She rejects such behavior as inappropriate by
uttering Hashek even though she has previously withstood my and her peers’ talking
about her body publicly in mixed company. In other words, we see here an instance
of a broader practice of teens negotiating facework norms that are distinct from local
notions of le respect.
In contrast, Example 4 below shows one teen correcting another for a supposed
breach of le respect in the presence of their adult male tutors. In this exchange, three
female students aged 13 to 15, Samira, Mounia, and Mina, were chatting with their
former male tutors, Mohammad and Djamel, both in their mid-twenties, about when
they would return to the neighborhood association Cerise to help with math home-
work. Mohammad and Djamel had completed their internship with the association
and so were no longer regularly employed there; they were just visiting that particu-
lar evening. When Djamel claimed that there was a new tutor to help them, Mina
complained that she was an “idiot” using the Arabic term, ‘agouna. Samira then
corrected Mina’s impropriety by uttering Hashek to her, simultaneously marking her
behavior as impolite and creating polite deference for her adult male tutors,
Mohammad and Djamel.
“What do you think about having beauty marks on your—Hashek!” 295
Example 4 : Hashek as other-correction to construct le respect
1 Samira Hé, vous revenez quand pour
les maths? Vous revenez
pas après?
Hey when are you coming back for math
homework? You’re not coming back after this?
2 Mohammad On va venir regulièrement.
Peut-être après Djamel il
va revenir regulièrement.
We’re going to come regularly. Maybe afterward
Djamel is going to come regularly. (laughing)
3 Mounia Quand? When?
4 Mohammad Janvier, février. January, February.
5 Mounia Février! Ah non! February! Oh no!
6 Djamel Il y a quelqu’un pour les
maths. Il y a une fille
pour les maths.
There’s someone for math homework. There’s a
girl (to help) with math.
7 Mina Ah c’est une ‘agouna. Oh she’s an idiot.
8 Samira Hashek!Hashek! (to Mina, while staring at her, unsmiling
and insistent)
The above excerpt demonstrates a more socially complex use of Hashek for other-
correction than evidenced in Example 3 in that, in addition to publicly marking a
teenaged peer as rude, the term is used to create deference for a third party, in this
case, the adult, male tutors, Mohammad and Djamel.
Thus we see that, like the previous examples, Hashek is not used in Example 4 in the
wake of a typical or codified context; the Arabic term ‘agouna (roughly, “idiot”;
literally, “beast/animal”) in and of itself does not in adult practice usually require the
corrective politeness formula among native Arabic speakers. In addition, what is
arguably also innovative here is Samira’s choice to utter the polite corrective both for
and seemingly also to Mina. As Goffman (1981) notes, through “participation frame-
works,” individuals move beyond “speaker” and “listener” toward multiple “speaker
roles” such animator and author, etc. Here, Samira can be seen to author this polite
utterance for Mina, in addition to scolding her with it. As noted earlier, native North
African Arabic speakers rarely use the term for other-correction outside of the context
of a parent correcting a child. However, here we see a teenager engaged in other-
correction of a peer in an instance that seems to be explicitly about establishing a
shared cultural propriety in front of their adult, male tutors, who are also of North
African descent. As such, Example 4 provides evidence for teenagers using Hashek
within a French context to elaborate facework norms not only for what might occur
within their peer group but also in front of adults who are cultural insiders.
The discursive complexity of this example provides evidence for teenagers’ appar-
ent ambivalence with reference to notions of le respect. Salima appears to be actively
protecting the face of Djamel and Mohammad, thus taking on a simultaneously
deferential and yet powerful position in their regard. Traditionalist depictions of le
respect claim a preeminence of adult men for conferring respect onto women and
children, as shown earlier. And yet, in the excerpt here, Samira, a female child, takes
on the powerful position of conferring respect onto her adult male tutors,
Mohammad and Djamel.
In addition, the action that Samira takes to confer le respect toward her tutors is also
an action that confers shame or impropriety onto Mina. Samira was often critical of
Mina for her overtly masculine styles of dress and language. Here correcting Mina for
her purportedly inappropriate behavior in front of her male tutors appears to be a way
for Samira to exert social control over the older girl. Thus, in reprimanding Mina,
Samira uses a so-called “politeness formula,” Hashek, to foreground her own propri-
ety at the expense of Mina’s.And while Samira’s utterance may attempt to restore the
social face of Mohammad and Djamel, her utterance also appears to be a face-
threatening action toward Mina.
The case demonstrates that teenagers elaborate their own (mutable, manipulable)
social norms regarding facework for their peer group in reference and also in con-
296 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
tradistinction to notions of le respect which they construct as a hierarchical system of
deference. By speaking for Mina, Samira achieves a performance of deference to
protect Mohammad’s and Djamel’s face based upon culturally informed (yet cultur-
ally transformative) notions of “polite” behavior.
Conclusion
Adolescents use Hashek as a central resource for constructing and enacting innovative
facework norms within their peer group. Rather than the respectful deference that the
term usually indicates among adults speaking North AfricanArabic, Hashek facilitates
irreverence and intimacy among teenagers of North African descent in a French
language context. More broadly, such uses of Hashek among teenagers evidence
change regarding attitudes toward le respect. These changes are complex and mul-
tiple, rather than unidirectional. In the uses of Hashek as self-correction, teenagers
undermine the ethos of le respect in that they use this term to facilitate irreverent,
face-threatening actions. Yet the possibility of using Hashek to manipulate the bound-
ary between play and insult within adolescent French-language interactions is
dependent upon meta-pragmatic stereotypes of Hashek in polite adult interactions in
Arabic that are dependent upon codes of le respect.
In uses of Hashek as other-correction, a more complex picture emerges that sur-
passes the mere undoing or challenging of le respect. In the excerpt in which I was
corrected for inappropriate talk about Cécile’s body, Hashek was employed in
response to my laughter, rather than my initial choice to talk about her body in front
of a male peer. Here, instead of reinforcing demure or gendered notions of deference
or le respect,Hashek constructs teenaged (or even personal/individual) notions of
appropriateness based upon Cécile’s rejection of my laughter as possibly mocking. In
the second case of other-correction (example 4), Samira corrects her peer, Mina, for
nondeferential and potentially insulting talk in front of adult, male tutors. This
example therefore fits more squarely within the rubric of le respect. And yet, Samira’s
use of the term also serves to publicly mark Mina as rude, and thus seems to
contradict the respectful deference that Samira is attempting to create. Furthermore,
as a young girl, Samira’s choice to protect the “face” of her adult, male tutor can be
seen to undermine the age hierarchy implicit in a dominant ideological construction
of le respect, which would normally cast her behavior as inappropriate. Thus, Samira
upholds conventional models of respect in one way, by invoking the need for defer-
ential behavior in front of an adult, but also subverts conventional models of respect
in another way; as a child, she does not have the authority or status normally neces-
sary to protect her tutor’s “respect.”
In these ways, teenagers’ uses of Hashek indicate their generationally based stances
toward le respect, which are both transgressive and dynamically reflexive with regard
to their parents’ facework practices. The pragmatic force of Hashek to mitigate teen-
agers’ face-threats in French is semantically linked to the more “traditional” and
codified use of this politeness formula in Arabic. The term’s usefulness for facilitating
face threatening actions among French-speaking teenagers is dependent upon its
discursive life in Arabic and polite usage by native Arabic-speaking parents. Hashek
therefore retains some meaning as a speech act by virtue of its status as an Arabic
term, but shifts in pragmatic force when imported into teenaged French-language
interactions. For example, given the choice of other available expressions in French,
such as, “je blaguais” (“I was joking”) Arab French teenagers often chose Hashek
due to its apparent usefulness and persuasiveness in mitigating potentially hurtful
teasing (in the case of self-correction) and in public shaming of peers (during
other-correction) even when different French-language terms were available for these
purposes.
Adolescents do not simply “break the rules” of politeness when they utter Hashek
in what their parents consider socially and linguistically inappropriate ways. Rather,
they articulate a set of practices and strategies that are commensurate with their
“What do you think about having beauty marks on your—Hashek!” 297
interactional goals as teenagers and which allow them to construct shared discursive
norms for their peer group in reference and in contradistinction to the projected
norms of their parents. These innovative practices demonstrate that facework is norm-
mediated, a fact which invites, rather than precludes, the creative manipulation of
such norms.
Innovative applications of Hashek demonstrate the transcultural effects of migra-
tion upon linguistic, cultural, and generational changes to facework rituals. The
reformulations of le respect that are evident in Hashek use among teenagers are a way
this code-specific genre both represents and enacts more pervasive cultural and
generational changes in the community, especially by reconfiguring social relation-
ships through facework norms. Innovative uses of Hashek do not just constitute “being
rude” or impolite, but rather foreground teenaged forms of solidarity and intimacy in
ways that reconfigure norms for le respect in peer settings. Hashek usage thus appears
to provide a way for Arab French teenagers to mediate between adherence to “tradi-
tional” models for social relationships and new ones. Teenagers are thereby socializ-
ing themselves to transcultural practices that partially dismantle and reinstate their
parents’ values and norms regarding politeness and facework.
Notes
1. For the sake of brevity, I will henceforth use “Arab French teenagers” to indicate that my
informants were French born of North African descent. I spell the term Hashek with a capital H
to denote the breathy Arabic “h”, that is, h
¯in IPA and ﺡin Arabic. In general, I follow
Kapchan’s [1996] system for transliteration of Moroccan Arabic.
2. I develop a more elaborate discussion of the concept of transculturality to analyze teen-
agers’ shared experiences of French, North African, and globalizing cultures in my book,
Transcultural Teens: Performing Youth Identities in French Cités (Tetreault 2015).
3. Le respect bears some resemblance to the Spanish-language concept, respeto (“respect”), as
well as some clear differences. Respeto, like le respect, connotes a system of deference and the
safeguarding of personal integrity that may, in some contexts, incorporate an ideological
understanding of age and gender hierarchies (cf. Lauria 1964). However, since the 1960s in the
United States, the concept has evolved into a political conceptual framework among Chicano
scholars and activists to create epistemological and pedagogical frameworks to combat racism
and sexism (Elenes et al. 2001; Rosaldo 1994; Valdés 1996). To my knowledge, le respect has not
been mobilized as a political platform to this degree in France; at the same time, my consultants
sometimes invoked the notion of le respect in order to observe the general lack of “respect” on
the part of French society for Arab and Muslim communities.
4. “Les musulmans, ils ne tappent pas. Nous, les musulmans—les hommes—ceux qu’ils
respectent le plus c’est les vieux, les femmes, et les enfants. Les femmes, tu ne peux pas les
taper. Tu ne peux pas lever la main contre elles.”
5. I do not intend to reify the practices related to Hashek as unchanging or uniform. The
possibility for manipulation is inherent to any linguistic norm, and the same can be said of
codified usage of Hashek. For example, the variation in scholars’ accounts of conventional uses
of Hashek in North Africa demonstrates that usage changes across time and region, not to
mention across interactional contexts.
6. The topic of ritual insult has a long and rich history in sociolinguistics and linguistic
anthropology. Foundational work emphasized the centrality of ritual insults to peer interac-
tions among male youth and distinguished between ritual and personal insult by claiming that
the former was understood as “not true” (Labov 1972b) and thus less threatening than the latter
(Abrahams 1962; Dundes et al. 1970; Labov 1972a, 1972b; Mitchell-Kernan 1971). Contempo-
rary research emphasizes the relative subtlety and shifting nature of this distinction (Eder 1990,
1995; Goodwin et al. 2002; Irvine 1992; Kochman 1983; Rampton 1995; Tetreault 2010).
7. This performance exhibits many features similar to what Chun (2009) documents as
“Asian mocking.”
8. Transcription conventions: An exclamation point is used to indicate combined stress and
loudness; a question mark indicates rising intonation. Periods and commas are used to indicate
pauses, the first within a phrase and the second at the end of a phrase. Longer pauses are
indicated by seconds in brackets. Double brackets indicate overlapping speech. Parentheses
indicate researcher comments. The term Hashek appears in bold type.
298 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
9. Specifically, Lampert and Ervin-Tripp (2006) note that although scholarship initially
emphasized the role of risky teasing for male solidarity (Lyman 1987; Keltner et al. 1998), their
research and others’ demonstrate women’s active use of such strategies to establish social
intimacy with friends (Crawford 1989, 1992; Lampert and Ervin-Tripp 1998; Marlowe 1984–
1985).
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