Chapter 4
Rhythm Types and the Speech of Working-Class
Youth in a Banlieue of Paris: The Role of Vowel
Elision and Devoicing
Zsuzsanna Fagyal, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
- Introduction
1.1 From teenage talk to “French of the suburbs”
Adolescents in multi-ethnic working-class suburbs (henceforth, banlieues) of
Paris have been repeatedly portrayed as the “movers and shakers” of lan-
guage change in French. The recurrent theme of “French being in the process
of giving birth to a new language” (Gadet 2003: 85), however, raises many
issues that are seldom examined. One such issue is the notion of novelty.
Verlan,^1 the most salient example of adolescent language use in France
and, reportedly, a hallmark of innovation by the multi-ethnic working-class
youth, goes back several centuries in the history of French as a type of word-
formation process based on the inversion of syllables and segments within the
word (Antoine 1998). Voltaire (1694–1778), the famous 18th-century French
writer and philosopher, resorted to this process to form his pseudonym from
the place name Airvault, the closest city to the village of Saint-Loup-sur-le-
Thouet in the Poitou region where his grandfather was born (Merle 2000).
Hiding the writer’s humble origins^2 , the “verlanized” pseudonym seems to
have de¿ ned the symbolic boundaries of an individual social self within the
larger community in much the same way as verlan is used today by the multi-
ethnic urban youth, reportedly “twisting French in every direction, modify-
ing, splitting, and inverting its words”^3 (Goudailler 1997: 9). Thus, rather than
a symbol identifying one social group at one point in time, verlan is probably
better understood as a way of indexing in the lexicon one’s adherence to, or
denial of, certain group values at a given time in the history of the language.
The “recycling” of old linguistic material in teenage talk is not unique to
French. Stenström et al. (2002: 158–159) analyze the use of well as an adjec-
tive modi¿ er (e.g., well bored, well hard) in the speech of London teenagers as