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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

#471

Post by mhkane »

baby wrote: post #377
mhkane wrote: post #155

[Commenting as an HN member born and raised in Côte d'Ivoire] Quite cool to see this topic trending! Some additional context: Two popular music genres that popularized nouchi in Côte d'Ivoire and then France are "Zouglou" (1990s) and "Coupé-Décalé" (2000-2010s). Both are past their primes but it's interesting to watch now the diffusion process into the French culture. In 2019, a few nouchi words were added to the Lar…

You can’t write that without dropping some youtube links

Fair enough, here are a few links:

- Les Parents Du Campus: Gboglo Koffi (1993): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOOo7GmMT0U

- Espoir 2000: Abidjan Farot (2006) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVpabquZFA

- Molare: le boucan (2008): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4bDNll6L0g

Boucantier is one of the words that was introduced in the Larousse dictionary in 2019

One of the key artists of the movement passed away in 2019 and I also wrote about the significance of these songs from an "urban youth" perspective: https://medium.com/mitafricans/farewell-to-dj-arafat-reflect...

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

#472

Post by biomcgary »

trgn wrote: post #451
nicbou wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised. I'm from Quebec. I am more comfortable speaking English with anyone than I am speaking French around French people. They just can't get over the accent, like I'm some sort of curiosity at the zoo. There are so many YouTube videos of French people mocking us. It's not curiosity but a distinctly French superiority complex. My friends who learned French had similar struggles in France versus elsewhere…

It's a european thing, not just french. Same in other languages. People are highly attuned to accents and geographical differences they imply. It's frustrating as a non-native speaker. English is "neutral" ground. Americans too are in general really patient with other people's accents, so just less used to that sort of provincialism.

People from the US generally find accents from other English speaking countries fairly charming (source I'm from the US) rather than a source of amusement or derision. I think attitudes about accents from non-English speakers vary more widely and regionally.

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

#473

Post by ch4s3 »

coldtea wrote: post #308
ch4s3 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This trope about the risk of being shot by police in the US is kind of dumb. Yes police shoot about 1,000 people here a year, but on average only 50 are unarmed. And among those where data is available the number where the unarmed person wasn’t attacking the officer with their bare hands boils down to basically the cases you’ve seen in the news. I can think of exactly 2 foreign nationals who have been shot while unar…

> This trope about the risk of being shot by police in the US is kind of dumb. Yes police shoot about 1,000 people here a year, but on average only 50 are unarmed. This makes it even worse... Since those armed people can also shoot you. In constrast the German police kills about 10 people a year, which given the population would amount to the US police killing 45 people total (so 5% that of the US). France, the worst…

> This makes it even worse... Since those armed people can also shoot you.

In theory, but reality fewer than 10% of all homicides are committed by someone who is a stranger to the victim. Of those, about half are the result of an argument that escalates to violence. You're exceedingly unlikely to be the victim of any violence as a tourist in almost any part of the US that a European might visit.

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

#474

Post by ch4s3 »

Symbiote wrote: post #282
ch4s3 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This trope about the risk of being shot by police in the US is kind of dumb. Yes police shoot about 1,000 people here a year, but on average only 50 are unarmed. And among those where data is available the number where the unarmed person wasn’t attacking the officer with their bare hands boils down to basically the cases you’ve seen in the news. I can think of exactly 2 foreign nationals who have been shot while unar…

The point being made was that worrying about going to jail for a tweet in Europe, or being pocketed, is dumb.

I don't think it was a good way to make the point though. And at least in the UK, they arrested, prosecuted, and convicted 567 people in 2017-2018 alone for violations of the Communications Act of 2003[1]. The convictions mostly seem to be for Tweets and Facebook messages.

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127

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

#475

Post by anthk »

blovescoffee wrote: post #429
anthk wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanish too, just not in Spain.

Only in a few countries representing a minority of speakers.

Bear in mind that it's still a perfectly valid word in Spanish. Such as "babuchas" to say sneakers/trainers in Andalusia.

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

#476

Post by jdmn73 »

pyeri wrote: post #405
n0n0n4t0r wrote: post #318

Hello, I'm a french (non Parisian) reader, and was very surprised by the comments I read. More precisely, the near 100% percent agreement on "french are despising non native speakers, especially the Parisians". I really don't feel it this way and am so surprised. I don't have more to add since I really never thought about this. Speaking of English: I work in an international company since one year and am I the proces…

Indian English has to be one of the easiest accent/dialect to understand. The way we speak isn't much different than how a Spanish, French or Italian would speak English, a bit slowly and trying to emphasize each consonant as we want to get it right.

I'm a native English speaker from the US midwest working as a software engineer.

For years, literally years, I thought my Indian coworkers, generally from Bangalore or Chennai, were using 'devil up' as a turn of phrase that had caught on in India but that I wasn't familiar with. Meaning something like 'come up with'.

Develop. They were saying develop.

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

#477

Post by trgn »

biomcgary wrote: post #472
trgn wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a european thing, not just french. Same in other languages. People are highly attuned to accents and geographical differences they imply. It's frustrating as a non-native speaker. English is "neutral" ground. Americans too are in general really patient with other people's accents, so just less used to that sort of provincialism.

People from the US generally find accents from other English speaking countries fairly charming (source I'm from the US) rather than a source of amusement or derision. I think attitudes about accents from non-English speakers vary more widely and regionally.

> find accents from other English speaking countries fairly charming

Agreed.

In addition, I feel like Americans give out more of an "A for effort" vibe in response, whereas Europeans are more like "nice try n00b".

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

#478

Post by FeloniousHam »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #366
Bayart wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly. Swiss German and Standard High German are entirely different languages, despite what the name would lead you to think. Quebec French is at most a dialect of French. There's as much different as there is between say RP English and Scottish English.

To be fair Scots was/is an actual language. Scottish English isn’t it but it certainly was heavily influenced by Scots. In all the three cases you’ve mentioned it’s a spectrum. The distinction between a language and a dialect is not clear at all. e.g. while it wouldn’t be correct to call Swiss-German a dialect of standard German both languages are German Dialects. > Quebec French is at most a dialect of French. Yes i…

""A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" is a phrase attributed to Max Weinreich, a Yiddish scholar and sociolinguist. Weinreich is said to have heard the phrase from an audience member at one of his lectures in the 1940s. "

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

#479

Post by philwelch »

vlovich123 wrote: post #38
heywhatupboys wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

I’m not sure where you’re getting your numbers, but Wikipedia claims 360 million native Arabic speakers, which pushes France a little further down the list.

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

#480

Post by BrandoElFollito »

Cyph0n wrote: post #106
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To non french readers: le gorafi is the french equivalent of the onion :)

And it seems to be a play on one of the largest French newspapers, Le Figaro (think: WaPo of France).

Not only on the name - the typography and general colors are close as well.
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