This seems completely unsurprising? Subcultures have their own slang, and some of it is spreading? That’s true in French/English/anything
How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
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Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#42https://archive.ph/nItnV I wonder what the Académie Française has to say about that...
The Académie nowadays is (mostly) a bunch of old politically influent people with zero or little linguistic knowledge. They stopped reforming the language almost two hundred years ago and now they can only hope that people will keep paying them attention. But the language will keep evolving and drifting, and they will keep resisting, until the divergence will be so large that they will just disappear into nothingness…
> They stopped reforming the language
That's the whole point of their existence...
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#43It's always fun to see foreigners coming to paris discovering that the french they learned at school is basically useless. Not only we use africans or arabic words, but we also speak in reverse, with noises, everything is shortened, etc.
In reverse? Do you mind sharing a couple examples? I’m not a French speaker and this sounds intriguing to me.
Look up verlan. It’s a type of French slang where you reverse syllables or sounds of words.
“Verlan” itself comes from the reverse of “l’envers” which means “reverse”.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#44It's always fun to see foreigners coming to paris discovering that the french they learned at school is basically useless. Not only we use africans or arabic words, but we also speak in reverse, with noises, everything is shortened, etc.
In reverse? Do you mind sharing a couple examples? I’m not a French speaker and this sounds intriguing to me.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#45It's always fun to see foreigners coming to paris discovering that the french they learned at school is basically useless. Not only we use africans or arabic words, but we also speak in reverse, with noises, everything is shortened, etc.
In reverse? Do you mind sharing a couple examples? I’m not a French speaker and this sounds intriguing to me.
I think the reference is to Verlan, where the syllables in a word are inverted. It reminds me of "Pig Latin": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#46You're find this out now? After four centuries of Spanish in the Americas, Spanish speakers there have developed an enormous culture and diversity and innovation in the language. I remind my Spanish friends that there are three times the number of Spanish speakers in Mexico than in Spain. In fact, there are more Spanish speakers in the United States there are more Spanish speakers than in Spain. Ditto for Portuguese,…
I love rap, and I've found many gems in Russian and French rap. These 2 scenes are extremely innovative! > I especially love the music coming out of Mali, Senegal and Algeria (Rai, anyone?). Yes please! Can I ask you for more suggestions, even besides Rai? In the old school, I love Magic System (Gaou), and for current hits, Aye Nakamura EDIT: I can't understand why this comment is downvoted, except maybe for politica…
I think the downvotes are because of the snark/swipe in "You're finding this out now?". That kind of thing is against the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - not just "Don't be snarky" and "Edit out swipes", but also "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." The point of the OP is not surprise that this is happening (obviously language evolves in this way), but curiosity about how it is happening.
It's a pity because the rest of the comment is fine.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#47It's always fun to see foreigners coming to paris discovering that the french they learned at school is basically useless. Not only we use africans or arabic words, but we also speak in reverse, with noises, everything is shortened, etc.
In reverse? Do you mind sharing a couple examples? I’m not a French speaker and this sounds intriguing to me.
French has "verlan", which is when you swap some of the syllables of a word to give it a slang or "street" vibe.
The world "verlan" itself is verlan for "envers" ("in reverse")
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
French is the lingua franca of much of the world....
What criteria are you using? ~320M French speakers globally (220M native, official language for 29 countries) ~559M Spanish speakers (~480M native, 20 countries) ~1.1B Mandarin speakers globally (a few countries, mother tongue in ~20 countries) ~1.5B English speakers globally (~400M native, official language for 67 countries) So for much of the world it seems pretty clearly English (& has been since WWII) and French…
Yet, somehow I have no problem calling French 'franca'...
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#49This seems completely unsurprising? Subcultures have their own slang, and some of it is spreading? That’s true in French/English/anything
The point of the article is not surprise that this is happening (obviously language changes in this way), but curiosity about how it is happening.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. A lot of very different words sound similar. A very simple grammatical mistake can completely change the meaning of a sentence. And yeah, it's probably kind of the same in English, but French is not the linga franca English is today (see what…
> People weren't correcting you to mock you. They wanted to understand and probably help you No. In France they openly showed their disgust at my French and refused even to speak to me.
For the reaction to be so strong I wonder if there was more than just broken French. Always easy to go with the super nice tourist/mean for no reason autoctone.
Anyway, sorry you had this experience.