N’importe nawak

The Nouvel Obs has a story this week about the popularity of “le langage des cités” among young people. The article’s angle is that it’s not just ordinary youths who are talking this way but even those from the most privileged segments of society. The article asks, “Le parler ‘caillera’, ce ‘langage des exclus’ longtemps vu comme une contre-culture ‘voyou’, voire une sous-culture, serait-il devenu tendance chez les jeunes nantis ?” (“Has ‘caillera’(hoodlum) talk, the ‘language of the excluded,’ long seen as a criminal counter-culture, even an underculture, become trendy among the young well-to-do?”)

Although the article isn’t alarmist in the French-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket style of many (most?) articles about changes to the language, it does suggest that the trendiness of slang from tough neighborhoods is a new phenomenon. It isn’t. Although “le langage des cités” is constantly changing, the spread of banlieue slang into the broader youth culture dates back at least to the 1970s. The singer Renaud often gets credited with popularizing it. His song “Laisse Béton” (= “laisse tomber”) was a big hit in 1977 and is full of banlieue slang that was current at the time.

As for rich kids talking like they’re from the ghetto, this too is nothing new. American linguist Natalie J. Lefkowitz, teaching in the mid-1980s at the Lycée Henri IV, one of the most prestigious lycées in France, found her students were fluent speakers of verlan (a type of slang that in recent times at least originated in the banlieue). As she put it “As a Fulbright teaching assistant in Paris, I was alarmed to discover that I often didn’t understand the language that my students were speaking around me.” Her article “Verlan: Speaking Backward in French” (The French Review 63.2) can be accessed here.

More broadly, the tendency of privileged youth to co-op lower-class slang is not limited to France, as anyone who’s driven by a frat house blasting gangsta rap can attest. In his study, Nineteenth-Century English, linguist Richard Bailey notes that in the early years of the nineteenth-century “fashionable young men [in England] were increasingly attracted to the jargon” of criminals. Plus ça change.

Camille Paglia, writing in Salon, contrasts the “empty, mechanical attitudinizing” of Sports Illustrated swimsuit models with Charlotte Gainsbourg singing in a “deliciously relaxed duet” with Etienne Daho:

“Here’s natural, invigorating French womanliness on display again in the supply expressive Gainsbourg. And despite the intermittent corniness of French pop, what an affectingly simple and evocative performance — a mature man and a sophisticated young woman exchanging meaningful glances and exploring a palette of authentic emotions.”  

And here’s the video–you can judge for yourself. (This post is partly just an excuse to try posting a video.)