African French

Interesting article in the NY Times by Elian Peltier about how West Africans are changing French. Right now about 60 percent of the people who speak French daily are in Africa, along with 80 percent of the school children studying in French. African French is fascinating partly because most Africans don't grow up speaking it at home. They learn it in school, sometimes as the only language of instruction and sometimes alongside the local tongue. They use it as adults because most West Africans now live in cities where people from many different ethnic groups mingle. In a city like Kinshasa or Abidjan, the people in one company or government office might speak three different African languages, so they use French with each other.

What has happened over the past twenty years is that French has become the language of the booming urban youth culture. While the populations of Europe and Asia are graying, that of Africa is getting more youthful, and the cities are exploding. But people don't speak the "correct" French they learned in school. Instead they use a free-wheeling new tongue full of African words and made-up expressions. The leaders in creating and spreading the new dialects include rappers, comedians, and gangsters, the demimonde of the new cities.

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.” . . .

In Abidjan this year, people began to call a boyfriend “mon pain” — French for “my bread.” Improvisations soon proliferated: “pain choco” is a cute boyfriend. A sugary bread, a sweet one. A bread just out of the oven is a hot partner. At a church in Abidjan earlier this year, the congregation burst out laughing, several worshipers told me, when the priest preached that people should share their bread with their brethren.

French is thriving in African cities despite what is in many ways a turn against the old colonial power. Rebel military leaders in Mali and Burkina Faso and have stripped French of its official status and are trying to use only African languages in their communications. Several prominent intellectuals have sworn off writing and speaking French. Polls show that a majority of young Africans harbor a lot of resentment against France.

But the momentum of French is too strong for governments to do much about it. It spreads via social media, over the radio, on television, but especially it spreads from person to person in the markets and nightclubs of the cities. Some people Peltier spoke to said they had to use French beause it was the only to keep West Africa from being dominated by English-speaking Nigeria with its thriving film industry. 

Some of this has even spread back to France, as slang words that originated in African cities appear in Paris and even in French dictionaries.

The world moves on, whether the old grouches at L'Académie française like it or not.