This seems completely unsurprising? Subcultures have their own slang, and some of it is spreading? That’s true in French/English/anything
Okay. Did anybody say they're surprised? Or are you just strawmanning?
How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
91–100 of 502 posts
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
I’ve had extraordinary luck with broken French in France. If you start in French and do your best, a lot of people suddenly speak fluent English. Especially in metro areas. But the experience does not compare to traveling with my partner who speaks fluent zero-accent French. Paris turns into a different much nicer city when you pair with a native speaker. That said, you’ll never get the level of service you see in US…
Europe as a whole has always come off as unpleasant to visit as an American, from what I've read online such as this thread. In no American city I've been to do you have to be so vigilant for pickpockets as you apparently do in European cities, and virtually no one in America will complain about your accent or grammar. We have free water at restaurants, and the staff won't treat you like a mooch for asking about it; in fact most staff of any business will make at least a basic attempt to be pleasant towards you. You get your money's worth in food portions at restaurants, the taxes are cheaper, you won't be arrested and fined for making a rude tweet.. why exactly would I want to visit Europe?
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#93Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
I’ve had extraordinary luck with broken French in France. If you start in French and do your best, a lot of people suddenly speak fluent English. Especially in metro areas. But the experience does not compare to traveling with my partner who speaks fluent zero-accent French. Paris turns into a different much nicer city when you pair with a native speaker. That said, you’ll never get the level of service you see in US…
> The French (Europe in general) just don’t care that much about customer UX. You either do it their way or you can leave.
I think Europe partly just has different preferences around service. We tend to find American servers annoyingly fake, and to be constantly needlessly interrupting us to ask if we need anything. And of course, one should also take into account the experience of being a server.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#95Earlier 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…
> 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?
locals are not obligated to please illiterate tourists
however the trick is simply to learn enough that you can politely ask if it's alright to use english with them
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
I met French speaking Quebecois in Paris. They were complaining the Parisians didn’t understand them. They weren’t enamoured to France.
Also that Parisians treat them like a backwater colony. That really doesn't sit well with the narrative that Quebec was always an independent people who were only ever under colonial rule after the evil English came along. Oh, and there were never any issues with the natives until the Brits.
Source: my grade school kids' history texts
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#97Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I imagine kids/teenagers originally, as with many linguistic innovations. But of course such people grow up and their conventions become mainstream.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#99It'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 Nice, I learned that nobody ever calls a toilet a "WC", but rather a "toilette", and that "ne" is generally optional in "ne .. pas" negation. But rappers like Dadju taught me Congolese slang like "kitoko." It took years to transform my American high school French into something less alien to people in France. Music was a huge part of that, though.
Re: How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
#100Earlier 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...
I see you are starting to understand ;)
Really, this is more of a honorific position for famous authors and those with enough political influence. Some deserve their fame, but they tend to be passed their prime and are far from expert linguists.
Their contributions are often treated as a joke by most French people. One of their mission is to maintain an official dictionary of the French language. The latest edition is nearly 100 years old. And for reforms, they only part of the process, most of the real work is done by actual expert linguists and legislators.