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How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

nytimes.com

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Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#61

Post by dataflow »

dudul wrote: post #17
grecy wrote: post #11

Learning French while exploring West Africa was enormously good fun. For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best. Nobody ever corrected my pronunciation or criticized me for my bad grammar and lack of vocabulary. (Cough, France, Cough). Thanks to all the encouragement and positivity I picked it up pretty quickly, and thoroughly enj…

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…

> French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French

The main criticism I've heard is kind of the opposite - that they dislike foreigners not trying to speak French, and just starting communication in English. If both of these are true then I guess that puts foreigners in a tough place where they're damned if they try and damned if they don't?

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#62

Post by homarp »

scrollaway wrote: post #43
nequo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

And "l'envers" is pronounced lanver

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#63

Post by vasco »

lm28469 wrote: post #58
Koshkin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, somehow I have no problem calling French 'franca'...

You do realize that "franca" here has nothing to do with French or France ? Neither today nor originally

I did not know the origin at all so looked it up:

> Based mostly on Northern Italy's languages (mainly Venetian and Genoese) and secondarily on Occitano-Romance languages (Catalan and Occitan) in the western Mediterranean area at first, Lingua Franca later came to have more Spanish and Portuguese elements, especially on the Barbary Coast (now referred to as the Maghreb). Lingua Franca also borrowed from Berber, Turkish, French, Greek and Arabic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#64

Post by passwordoops »

dudul wrote: post #17
grecy wrote: post #11

Learning French while exploring West Africa was enormously good fun. For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best. Nobody ever corrected my pronunciation or criticized me for my bad grammar and lack of vocabulary. (Cough, France, Cough). Thanks to all the encouragement and positivity I picked it up pretty quickly, and thoroughly enj…

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

I'm (an anglophone) from Quebec and worked in Europe for a while. Parisians totally mock people not speaking Parisian French. They're even open and extraordinarily condescending about it. The rest of the country is cool and generally helpful

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#66

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

scrollaway wrote: post #43
nequo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

Who has time for that?

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#67

Post by csdvrx »

sesm wrote: post #54
csdvrx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Gems in Russian rap? As a native speaker I’m genuinely surprised

> Gems in Russian rap?

YES: the music and the rythms are great but the visual composition (scenery, etc) is even more wonderful: in Cadillac the drone shots then the rotations with the slow blends of racing games ending the nostril are very unique.

The visuals in rap are rarely that creative

> As a native speaker I’m genuinely surprised

Do you find surprising I also like the social critique from IC3PEAK (Смерти Больше Нет) or моргенштерн (Aristocrat)? (but he's lost some of his magic since he moved)

If you do, give me better recommendations!

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#68

Post by [deleted] »

pelorat wrote: post #42
edwcross wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[deleted]

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#69

Post by seszett »

playingalong wrote: post #40
nequo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reverse? Do you mind sharing a couple examples? I’m not a French speaker and this sounds intriguing to me.

They likely meant non-standard word order in a sentence. Not reading the words backwards.

No, it's speaking the word backwards, syllable-wise.

L'envers becomes verlan, femme becomes meuf, fête teuf, louche is chelou and merci is cimer, for the most common, everyday words.

It can even go further, with Arabe becoming Beur which itself gets verlanised into Rebeu. Or meuf, femeu.

Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time

#70

Post by freeney »

dudul wrote: post #32
yieldcrv wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds like people in west african countries have a superior understanding of the purpose of language, which is to convey shared concepts

No, it's just that they were themselves learning French, so used to speaking broken French. You would get the same experience by gathering a German, an Australian and a Venezuelan all learning French as 2nd or 3rd language. Additionally they most likely already knew English and were able to decipher "French broken by an English speaker". Edit: and since we're sharing anecdotes. I got the same "rude" treatment from Ru…

I don’t think this issue is about the French spoken in West Africa being 'broken.' Or that 'they were themselves learning French'… Rather, it reflects the tolerance and adaptability inherent in multilingual societies like those in West Africa. People are simply more accustomed to communicating across different languages and more accepting of non-native speakers and various accents, even if they are native speakers themselves. Ironically this tolerance as opposed to the supposed academic perfection of the language spoken in France makes use of the language as it was initially intended when it was created a lingua franca meant to be used by a wide variety of people. In France however there is often less tolerance for varying pronunciations and accents, not everyone is the same in that regard but it’s definitely something people experience in France (we would wish that maybe they would resort to English sometime to continue the conversation or correcting us but this is much less likely too).

This isn't just about non-native speakers but also applies to native French speakers from regions like Quebec or Congo. Despite using similar vocabulary, they sometimes face challenges being understood in France, mainly due to their distinct accents, I mean I believe this also occurs between various region of France

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