“The social meaning of ‘le langage des jeunes’ : representations across users, listeners and media”

Description

Abstract: This paper takes ‘le langage des jeunes’ (and various related monikers for this variety or style) as an object of study in an attempt to understand the social significance of this term. The core research questions approached in the paper are:

What does the term ‘parlers jeunes’ represent for users and non-users of the variety and for media commentators?
Do consistent social meanings persist across these different groups, and if so, what are they?
What linguistic features pertain to the variety according to media reports?
Boyer (1997) notes that ‘parler jeune’ or ‘langue des cités’ is ‘un objet linguistique médiatiquement identifié’, and the perennial recurrence of media discussion about this linguistic variety continues to this day, often centring on apparently novel features notably in the lexis and in phonetic realisations e.g affrication. This paper draws on a corpus of French-language news articles to identify what features are, for media commentators, central to ‘parlers jeunes’ and uses a corpus-assisted discourse analytical approach to interrogate the language attitudes and ideologies identified in that specially compiled corpus.

To understand user and listener perspectives, the study draws on a set of metalinguistic comments on the use of crari on French-language Twitter. These comments are a very small subset of a 5-million-word corpus of tweets which use crari and which, rather than representing usage, comment on the use of the term and its social meaning. We can assume that these reactions come from speakers who have encountered the term in spontaneous use. This element of the study is intended to give an indication of the social meaning carried by the use of such terms related to ‘parlers jeunes’, and crari is used as one (likely geographically and temporally limited) example of a parler jeune feature.

Finally, the paper draws on a set of listener responses to recordings of parler jeune features to identify patterns in social meaning evoked by the variety. These have been reported in previous work but here are combined with two new datasets of newspaper reports and metalinguistic commentary from users to identify shared and contrasting elements of social meaning associated with these socially salient speech styles.

Period	17 May 2024
Event title	“Le ‘langage des jeunes’: évolution des usages et représentations”
Event type	Conference
Location	Vienna, AustriaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International