Is There Such a Thing as a “Young Language”?

[Un article de The Conversation écrit par Auphélie Ferreira – Enseignante-chercheuse contractuelle en linguistique française, Université de Strasbourg]

“Gadjo”, “despee”, “tchop”: these words are associated, in media discourse, with “young talk”. There are many articles that focus on this vocabulary to make it accessible to other generations or even dictionaries intended for parents who no longer seem to understand their teenagers.

So, does this young language really exist as such? Could it be summarized in a lexicon of its own? Several studies have been carried out in linguistics on these language practices, but they do not constitute a homogeneous field, in particular because they concern diverse sociolinguistic situations.

If we want to consider the existence of a young language, we should at a minimum think of it in the plural. No two people speak the same way and the same person does not constantly speak the same way. All individuals have several repertoires or several styles, young people are no exception.

Defining youth: biological or sociological criteria?

Before seeing if there are constituent elements of a repertoire common to young people, a question arises: who are these young people? To take Bourdieu again, age is only a manipulated biological data around which categories can be constructed.

The “young” category was able to be defined according to independence criteria by demographers: end of studies, entry into working life, departure from the family home, etc. But these criteria are no longer entirely valid today. The “young people” category is widely questioned and searchable.

In media discourse and linguistic studies, it is in reality mainly young people from urban, multicultural and plurilingual environments. The young people are often adolescents. Adolescence would correspond to a period of maximum deviation from “standard” French, from French that is valued, in particular, at school.

But would there even be linguistic traits that would allow us to identify ways of speaking specific to people grouped in this category? To address this question, we can rely on the MPF (Multicultural Paris French) corpus, a set of recordings (a total of 83 hours) made with 187 “young” speakers living in the Paris region.

Lexicon, syntax, accent: particularities among young people?

The analysis of the language practices of these young people highlights several recurring features. At the lexical level, we note processes such as apocope, or loss of a syllable, in “mytho” for “mythomane” for example. We also find verlan, with words like “chanmé”, which corresponds to the inversion of the syllables of “villain”, or even “despee” which combines borrowing from the English “speed” and verlanization. Alongside other older borrowings, such as “kiffer” borrowed from Arabic kiff (love) well entered French with the addition of the ending “-er”, we identify “gadjo” borrowed from Romani (“boy”) or “chouf”, borrowed from Arabic and meaning “look”.

On the syntactic level, little is noted, because it is in reality the level of the language system which is the least flexible. If some note, for example, the omission of the “ne” in negative structures (“I won't answer him”), this is in reality not specific to young people. This phenomenon more closely reflects the uses of more ordinary spoken French.

On the “accent” side (bringing together the melody or the pronunciation of certain vowels or consonants), certain features could be identified such as the penultimate syllable which becomes longer, the emphatic contour or even the affrication strong /t/ as in “confitchure”. However, studies also show that these traits are not specific to young people (this is the case of affrication or even emphatic contour, we use the latter to highlight an element and we find it when a speaker is engaged in the interaction).

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Apart from the speed which could be specific to young people's ways of speaking (young people would speak faster, use more words per minute), it should be noted that the particularities relate to the exploitation of processes which are in no way innovative. The verlan was found in Renaud (“leaves concrete”), the borrowings that we no longer see with apricot borrowed, by Portuguese or Italian, from Arabic al-barqûq, parking borrowed from English or schlinguer borrowed from German and which we find in particular in Hugo, in the Miserable :

“It’s very bad not to sleep. It makes you stand out in the hallway, or, as they say in high society, stink out of your mouth. »

The same goes for structures where the that seems omitted, “I think it’s the sixties”. These are singled out and attributed to young people. However, they are also used by less young people, as with this 40 year old speaker “I think it pleases them” and we find them in the Renart's novel dating from the end of the 12th century^e century: “Don’t cook your faults before a year” (“I don’t think you’ll miss any before a year”).

Magnifying glass effect: ways of speaking made visible by networks

If the processes are not innovative, then where does this impression of “young people speak” come from? This is based on a “magnifying glass effect” or a concentration effect, according to sociolinguist Françoise Gadet. These young languages ​​would be perceived by the multiplication of particularisms: use of verlan, borrowings, emphatic contour, etc.

The magnifying glass effect is itself reinforced by the media or by the speeches which highlight these phenomena on social networks. And if we have the impression that “for this generation, it is more marked than before”, it is probably because these ways of speaking are now more easily observable. Network-mediated communications make linguistic productions visible on a large scale. These linguistic “fashions” are, however, not exclusive to today’s youth. Each generation has its preferences, but nothing completely disappears: a term like “daron” although old, goes through the ages.

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Finally, young people exploit the French language system to enrich it and meet different needs. The words created are not simple equivalents of what could exist, but are clearly distinct from them. According to Emmanuelle Guerin, a “clash” (borrowing from English) takes on a more specific meaning than shock since he evokes a verbal confrontation: “They led the clash with the teacher. » When there are creations, they enrich the linguistic repertoire by responding to needs for identification with groups (these phenomena are often found in interactions where complicity takes precedence) or expression.

There is therefore no such thing as young people speaking, but ways of speaking by people categorized as “young”. We qualify ways of speaking “young” by the presence (and especially the concentration) of certain linguistic elements, which we can find in less young people, for example, in Stéphane aged 36: “I don’t know who you are do you see what I mean I did to them like that (.) like I sometimes there are young people they have hatred towards us eh […] No, but they were the nejeus in real life. »

If certain words used by young people seem to escape older people, remember that everyone (including you and me) sometimes uses terms that may be incomprehensible to those around us, especially those from our professional environment. There is nothing alarming in these “young people's speeches”: each generation has its own modes of expression, and the few words deemed incomprehensible by the media do not reflect the extent of the repertoires concerned.