Why Do Offenders Use the Word “Suddenly” So Often? An Exploration of Language Patterns.

linguists. Lotfi Abouda is one of them. In 2022, he published a study based on the exploration of an oral corpus of around 1.3 million words. He notes a spectacular quantitative transformation: while only 5 occurrences of the “sudden” connector appeared between 1968 and 1971, there are 141 in the data collected since 2010.

This hexagonal specificity is so marked that other French -speaking communities use it as geographic detector: in Quebec, it immediately identifies a French speaker (just like the expression “once” instantly betrays a Belgian). In addition, in a corpus of 120 hours of recordings analyzed, out of 614 occurrences identified, 67 % are produced by speakers belonging to the age group 15-25 years. The phenomenon therefore seems generational.

Langagier TIC mechanisms and functions

In linguistics, the term “tick of language” is considered derogatory by specialists who prefer to speak of “speech markers”. Julie Neveux, lecturer at the Sorbonne, explains that these expressions work like “crutch words” which “fill a void” and on which “we rely when we seek something to say”. The expression “suddenly” is experiencing a process of “pragmaticization”: consecutive expression, it becomes a meta-discursive marker, used to link speech segments in a more or less motivated way. In 82 % of cases, it appears in the frontal position in the statement, acting more as a speech primer than as a real logical link.

Roman linguist Jakobson has theorized this function under the term “phatic function”: these words are not used to communicate an informative message, but to maintain contact between speaker and recipient, like the “Allô” on the phone. “Suddenly” fulfills this function of maintaining the conversational link, making it possible to structure thought, to attract attention and to furnish the potentially embarrassing silences.

Use the markers of its time

Sociologist Erving Goffman has developed an analysis of interactions as “miniature ceremonies”. In its concept of face-work (figuration work), it shows how our intersubjective relationships constitute a process of joint development of the face, this “positive social value that a person actually claims”.

The expression “suddenly” is part of what Goffman calls “ritual idiom”: this vocabulary of behavior which transmits a self -image that meets social expectations. Using the markers of his time, the speaker signals his belonging to the social group and avoids the “false notes” which could compromise the interaction. “Suddenly” saves the face, to avoid silence, to show that we control the implicit codes of the dialogue. It is a marker of co -presence, of continuity of the exchange.

The “language tics” often work as markers of belonging to a sociological or generational group. The generation which massively employs “suddenly” unconsciously underlines its inscription in the contemporary era.

The marker of an era hit

The expression “suddenly” finds root in a prolix word in French: “blow”. Love at first sight, hard blow, draft, low blow, suddenly, stress, tiredness, blues… The lexeme systematically summons the idea of shock, rupture, unforeseen event. This proliferation of the semantic field of the “blow” in the contemporary French language deserves sociological analysis.

The “blow” evokes brutality, suddenness, unexpected impact. In a society where the acceleration of social time and “liquid modernity” create a feeling of permanent instability, this semantics of shock could reflect the subjective experience of a generation “hit” by events. “Suddenly” resonates with the state of a contemporary world marked by the unpredictability, the discontinuity, the multiplication of the “blows” of life, of fate, of events.

Contemporary uncertainty and fragmentation of meaning

The generation which massively employs “suddenly” is that of uncertainty: professional precariousness, imposed flexibility, zigzag careers, continuous flow information, continuous technological upheavals. Sociological works converge to describe a contemporary “plural” individual, “delivered to his experiences”, evolving in a “world of risks” where traditional landmarks are crumbling.

Would this existential insecurity result in what linguists call “linguistic insecurity”? The forms of verbal disfluence (such as “uh”, “hum”, or “suddenly”) are not simple “parasites”: they reflect an emotional tension or a hesitation of the speaker, often nourished by an uncertainty in the face of standards or mastery of discourse, a fortiori in an uncertain world. In this context, “suddenly” would work as a discursive strategy for managing the unpredictable, giving an illusion of continuity and consequence, even when the logical link is lacking (in 45 % of uses).

Nonsense in the adaptive sense

“Suddenly” can be analyzed as an expression in the floating, contextual, almost empty sense, but this “emptiness” is functional: it fills, structure, reassures. It becomes the index of a desire to link what has been disconnected, to put the binder in a discourse fragmented by the contemporary experience of discontinuity. The expression is both the sign of a loss of rigorous consecutive sense and an adaptive linguistic creativity in the face of social changes.

“Suddenly” could thus crystallize a particular civilizational anxiety, linked to the social, economic and technological transformations that French society has been going through since the 1990s. By punctuating the discourse of this expression, the contemporary speaker simulates the mastery of logical sequences in a world that largely escapes him. The expression gradually becomes “less connector than a deictic activator”, allowing the statement to “take root in the occurrent enunciative context”.

“Suddenly” is much more than a language of language. It is the mirror of a unstructured era, a generation in search of links and meaning. It seems to say the need to re-generate the world, even with verbal filling. Language, once again, absorbs the tensions of its time.

A conclusion, suddenly?

“Suddenly” could thus be interpreted as the linguistic expression of an unconscious resistance to the crumbling of meaning: faced with the relative incomprehensibility of our contemporary condition, we persist in maintaining the appearance of a discursive mastery. This enunciative strategy paradoxically reveals our humanity: to continue to speak is to assert our ability to weave social ties despite uncertainty, to maintain exchange even when logic escapes us. In this sense, “suddenly” constitutes less an impoverishment than a symptom of our adaptive creativity in the face of changes in modernity.