Rhythm Types and the Speech of Working-Class Youth in a Banlieue of Paris 101
active population are regularly out of work, 59% of them for a year or longer.
The town is known for its housing projects, among them La Cité des Quatre-
Mille, infamous for riots that shook France for the ¿ rst time in the 1980s. Its
residents are routinely depicted in the French and foreign media as involved
in drug dealings, clashes with the police, collective rape, and even Islamic
Jihad.^27 Several speakers from both ethnic groups in the corpus live in one of
the many housing projects in town.
2.3 Task, corpus, and measurements
The short paragraph in Appendix A was submitted to each of the speakers at
the end of a picture-naming task. The speakers were recorded individually
and instructed to read the text in a natural fashion. They could study the text
prior to reading it in order to minimize hesitations and false starts that would
have made it impossible to obtain continuous speech data.
Table 4.1 Demography of Speakers of North African (AF) and European (EF)
DescentSpeaker (code name) Grade in school Age généraleMoyenne * Parents’ birth countryAF
Khatib 4 13 8.30AlgeriaLaith 5 12 9.20
Mousa 5 13 9.93
Ya s i n 3 14 15. 9 0
Ramey 4 13 8.90 NA
mean 4.2 13.0 10.45
EF
Alain 6 11 13.73+FranceChris 6 11 10.77+
Jacob 6 11 10.86+
Octave 4 13 12.96
Karl 4 13 8.66
mean 5.2 11.8 11.4
*(Moyenne générale is based on average grade in school from the preceding year or, for
the 6th graders (+), on the ¿ rst semester in middle school +).