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Elian Peltier, "How Africans Are Changing French — One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time", NYT 12/12/2023:

French, by most estimates the world’s fifth most spoken language, is changing — perhaps not in the gilded hallways of the institution in Paris that publishes its official dictionary, but on a rooftop in Abidjan, the largest city in Ivory Coast.

There one afternoon, a 19-year-old rapper who goes by the stage name “Marla” rehearsed her upcoming show, surrounded by friends and empty soda bottles. Her words were mostly French, but the Ivorian slang and English words that she mixed in made a new language.

To speak only French, “c’est zogo” — “it’s uncool,” said Marla, whose real name is Mariam Dosso, combining a French word with Ivorian slang. But playing with words and languages, she said, is “choco,” an abbreviation for chocolate meaning “sweet” or “stylish.”

A growing number of words and expressions from Africa are now infusing the French language, spurred by booming populations of young people in West and Central Africa.

You can find a couple of Marla's videos from earlier this year on YouTube.

Later in the article, Peltier focuses on Nouchi:

In the sprawling Adjamé market in Abidjan, there are thousands of small stalls selling electronics, clothes, counterfeit medicine and food. The market is a perfect laboratory in which to study Nouchi, a slang once crafted by petty criminals, but which has taken over the country in under four decades. […]

Germain-Arsène Kadi, a professor of literature at the Alassane Ouattara University in Ivory Coast, walked deep into the market one morning carrying with him the Nouchi dictionary he wrote.

Kadi's dictionary is available on line, and Amazon also lists some other (and mostly less scholarly) Nouchi resources.

Wikipedia's page on African French has a section of Abidjan French, which notes that

There are three sorts of French spoken in Abidjan. A formal French is spoken by the educated classes. Most of the population, however, speaks a colloquial form of French known as français de Treichville (after a working-class district of Abidjan) or français de Moussa (after a character in chronicles published by the magazine Ivoire Dimanche which are written in this colloquial Abidjan French). Finally, an Abidjan French slang called Nouchi has evolved from an ethnically neutral lingua franca among uneducated youth into a creole language with a distinct grammar.[25] New words often appear in Nouchi and then make their way into colloquial Abidjan French after some time.[26] As of 2012, a crowdsourced dictionary of Nouchi is being written using mobile phones.[27]

There's a (French language) Wikipedia article on Nouchi, which explains that

Le nouchi est un argot né en Côte d'Ivoire et constitué d'un mélange de français et de plusieurs langues africaines plus ou moins géographiquement proches.

…and gives the etymology of the name:

« Nou », en malinké, signifie « le nez », et « chi » « poil ». Cela donne en un mot, « poil de nez » donc « moustache » pour désigner le méchant, à qui tout le monde voulait ressembler. Un « nouchi », c’est un homme fort, craint de tous et qui n’a peur de rien ni de personne.

The article's opening section, under the heading "Le nouchi, l'identité d'un peuple" (Nouchi, the identity of a people"), says that

De sa consonance argotique, le nouchi devient une langue véhiculaire, un code linguistique de reconnaissance et d'identification sociale. Le terme « argot » ne traduit plus la réalité de cette langue qui n'est plus seulement parlée par une frange de la population inéduquée, mais par la majorité des habitants, notamment la jeunesse qui en constitue 60 % de la population ivoirienne.

Ce parler bénéficie d'un grand privilège autant national qu'international. Grâce à sa phonologie aisée, la langue française lui emprunte des mots, les expatriés veulent l'apprendre ; les politiques, et les médias s'en servent dans leur communication pour que leurs messages soient mieux reçus.

Le nouchi n'est plus un argot mais n'est pas encore une langue au sens politico-social du terme. C'est un outil de reconnaissance pour les Ivoiriens de la diaspora, une langue véhiculaire et un moyen de communication par excellence en Côte d'Ivoire.

I haven't been able to find any online copies of Ivoire Dimanche or its stories featuring Moussa. But according to Paulin Djité, "French in Côte d'Ivoire: A Process of Nativization" 1989, those stories go back to the 1970s:

[M]ost of the written texts in Popular French are artificial reconstructions and stereotypical approximations of the spoken language.. "La Chronique de Moussa", "Dago", "Zézé" of Ivoire Dimanche, the comic strip Zazou, the tape-recorded materials of L'Abbé Paul Kodjo ("Le Saint Homme Job", and "La Création") and similar works are deliberate attempts by some intellectuals to give a picturesque distortion of Popular French. Their main purpose is to achieve a comical effect. Needless to say, they are not authentic representations of the variety. No one in real life speaks like the characters in these texts.

With this in mind, it is easy to understand the strong reactions from teachers, educators, and parents when the first issues of "La Chronique de Moussa" came out in the early seventies.

There are several other published papers on Nouchi, e.g. Sasha Newell "Enregistering modernity, bluffing criminality: How Nouchi speech reinvented (and fractured) the nation," 2009; Hannah Sande, "Nouchi as a Distinct Language: The Morphological Evidence", 2015; etc.

But there are many Nouchi-language videos on YouTube, for example this comedic sketch:

and this instructional video:

Languagehat quoted from the NYT article when it appeared, and pointed to a 2017 post which in turn points to an interesting 2015 piece by Dave Sayers, "Getting past the ‘indigenous’ vs. ‘immigrant’ language debate".

That's all I have time for this morning — but the links above open up a veritable feast.

December 17, 2023 @ 8:13 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language contact, Linguistic history

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