We often associate fashionable expressions or practices like verlan with youth. But isn’t it a misuse of language to evoke a “youthful” speech? Is there really a vocabulary or a use of syntax that would allow us to identify ways of expressing ourselves specific to young people?

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

So, does this youth speech really exist as such? Could it be summed up in its own unique lexicon? Several studies have been conducted in linguistics on these language practices, but they do not constitute a homogeneous field, particularly because they concern diverse sociolinguistic situations.

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

Defining youth: biological or sociological criteria?

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

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

In media discourse and linguistic studies, it is actually mainly young people from urban, multicultural and multilingual backgrounds. The young people are often adolescents. Adolescence corresponds to a period of maximum deviation from “standard” French , from a French valued, in particular, at school.

But are there even language 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 (83 hours in total) made with 187 “young” speakers living in the Paris region.

Vocabulary, 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 “mythomaniac” for example. We also find verlan, with words such as “chanmé,” which corresponds to the inversion of the syllables of “villain,” or “despee,” which combines borrowing from the English “speed” and verlanization. Alongside other older borrowings, such as “kiffer,” borrowed from the Arabic kiff (to love) which has 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 this is actually the least flexible level of the language system. While some note, for example, the omission of “ne” in negative structures (“je lui répondrai pas”), this is not actually specific to young people. This phenomenon reflects more the uses of more ordinary spoken French.

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

Apart from the flow rate which could be specific to the ways of speaking of young people (young people would speak faster, would use more words per minute), it should be noted that the particularities come from the exploitation of processes which are not at all innovative. Verlan was found in Renaud (“laisse béton”), the borrowings which we no longer see with apricot borrowed, by Portuguese or Italian, from Arabic al-barqûq , parking borrowed from English or even schlinguer borrowed from German and which we find notably in Hugo, in Les Misérables  :

“Not sleeping is very bad. It makes you stink from the hallway, or, as they say in high society, stink from the mouth.”

The same goes for structures where the que seems to be omitted, “I think it was the sixties.” These are singled out and attributed to young people . However, they are also used by older people, as in the case of this 40-year-old speaker, “I think it pleases them,” and we find them in the Roman de Renart dating from the end of the 12th ^century  : “Ne cuit devant un an vos faille” (“I don’t think you’ll be short of it 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’s speech” come from? It is based on a “magnifying glass effect” or a concentration effect, according to sociolinguist Françoise Gadet . These young people’s speeches would be perceived by the multiplication of particularities: use of verlan, borrowings, emphatic contour, etc.

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

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 it. According to Emmanuelle Guerin , a “clash” (borrowed from English) takes on a more specific meaning than shock since it 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 connivance prevails) or for expression.

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So there is no such thing as a youthful speech, but rather ways of speaking by people categorized as “young.” We qualify “young” ways of speaking by the presence (and especially the concentration) of certain linguistic elements, which can be found in people who are less young, for example, in Stéphane, aged 36  : “I don’t know who you are, you know what I mean, I did it to them like that (.) like sometimes there are young people, they hate us, eh […] No, but they were the real negames.”

While some words used by young people seem to escape the attention of older people, let’s 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 about this “youth talk”: each generation has its own ways of expressing itself, and the few words deemed incomprehensible by the media do not reflect the extent of the repertoires concerned.

Author Bio: Auphelie Ferreira is a Contractual Lecturer-Researcher in French linguistics at the University of Strasbourg