Elian Peltier (reporting from Abidjan, Dakar, and Paris for the NY Times) has a fine description of the changes the strong Francophone presence in Africa are bringing to the mother tongue:
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. More than 60 percent of those who speak French daily now live in Africa, and 80 percent of children studying in French are in Africa. There are as many French speakers in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as in Paris. Through social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube, they are literally spreading the word, reshaping the French language from African countries, like Ivory Coast, that were once colonized by France.
“We’ve tried to rap in pure French, but nobody was listening to us,” said Jean Patrick Niambé, known as Dofy, a 24-year-old Ivorian hip-hop artist listening to Marla on the rooftop. “So we create words from our own realities, and then they spread.”
Walking down the streets of Paris or its suburbs, you can hear people use the word “enjailler” to mean “having fun.” But the word originally came from Abidjan to describe how adrenaline-seeking young Ivorians in the 1980s jumped on and off buses racing through the streets.
The youth population in Africa is surging while the rest of the world grays. Demographers predict that by 2060, up to 85 percent of French speakers will live on the African continent. That’s nearly the inverse of the 1960s, when 90 percent of French speakers lived in European and other Western countries. “French flourishes every day in Africa,” said Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a renowned Senegalese professor of philosophy and French at Columbia University. “This creolized French finds its way in the books we read, the sketches we watch on television, the songs we listen to.” […]
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. At a maquis, a street restaurant with plastic tables and chairs, the owner gathered a few jassa men in their corner, or “soï,” to throw out their favorite words while they drank Vody, a mix of vodka and energy drink.
“They’re going to hit you,” the owner said in French, which alarmed me until they explained that the French verb for “hit,” frapper, had the opposite meaning there: Those jassa men would treat us well — which they did, throwing out dozens of words and expressions unknown to me in a few minutes.
Mr. Kadi frantically scribbled down new words on a notepad, saying repeatedly, “One more for the dictionary.”
It’s nearly impossible to know which word crafted on the streets of Abidjan might spread, travel or even survive. “Go,” meaning “girlfriend” in Ivory Coast, was entered into the well-known French dictionary Le Robert this year. 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. The expression has spread like a meme on social media, reaching neighboring Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic of Congo, thousands of miles away. It hasn’t reached France yet. But Ivorians like to joke about which expressions French people will pick up, often years, if not decades, later.
It ends with a nod in the direction of the Académie:
But some in France are slow to embrace change. Members of the French Academy, the 17th-century institution that publishes an official dictionary of the French language, have been working on the same edition for the past 40 years. On a recent evening Dany Laferrière, a Haitian-Canadian novelist and the only Black member of the academy, walked the gilded corridors of the Academy’s building, on the left bank of the Seine River. He and his fellow academicians were reviewing whether to add to the dictionary the word “yeah,” which appeared in French in the 1960s.
Mr. Laferrière acknowledged that the Academy might need to modernize by incorporating entire dictionaries from Belgian, Senegalese, or Ivorian French. “French is about to make a big leap, and she’s wondering how it’s going to go,” Mr. Laferrière said of the French language. “But she’s excited about where she’s headed.” He paused, stared at the Seine through the window, and corrected himself.
“They, not she. They are now multiple versions of French that speak for themselves. And that is the greatest proof of its vitality.”
Lots more at the link, including a map and a bunch of glorious color photos (archived link, in case the main one shuts you out). Thanks, Eric, Bonnie, and Eduardo! (This link clearly shouts “Languagehat,” since people keep sending it to me…) We discussed Nouchi back in 2017.
Update. See now Mark Liberman’s post at the Log, with many links (including videos) about Nouchi.
Interesting. I wonder about pain. Simply a shortening of copain?
That was my guess.
Related? This Portuguese, sense of “pão”.
https://www.memrise.com/en-us/learn-portuguese/portuguese-course/phrasebook/65581076578562/how-to-say-he-s-such-a-hunk-in-portuguese
then gf must be peine (pine would be vulgar).
“Vody” – reminded me somethign MUCH more innocent: https://vodavoda.com/vodavodavodica/
It’s not so much that “the Africans are changing French” as it is the Africans are developing their own varieties of French. I wonder how many of their neologisms, neosemanticisms, and other innovations have been adopted in non-African varieties of the language.
That’s what Laferrière said, but the whole ecosystem changes. The role of French in Africa changes, and the nature of its contacts with French French will change too.
I’m still imressed by the numbers. 47.2 percents for sub-Saharan Africa and ~1.6 times more today than in 2010 (both due to population growth and growing use), 14.6 MENA…. This and development/modernisation/urbanisation/westernisation too must lay the foundation for something.
___
PS to my previous unrelated comment: the list of characters in this link is instructive: Sirena Milena, Vasa od talasa, Lelujava Lela, Bred Kit. I did not know sirena “mermaid”, talas “wave” < طلاس / طالاز < Greek and that lelujati/lelejati is “to sway”! In Russian it means to care[ss], cherish…
@drasvi
Vasmer has
леле́ять, -е́ю, укр. лелíяти, болг. ле́лям, леле́я «укачиваю», сербохорв. лелѝjȃм, лелѝjати; ле̑љам, ле́љати «качать, болтать», чеш. стар. leleti «волновать», польск. стар. lelejanie «fluctus».
… Далее ср. др.-инд. lēlā́yati, lēlāyáti, lēláyati «качает(ся), дрожит», lálati «играет», lālауаti «ласкает, лелеет», возм., англос. lǽl «прут, ветка»…, so perhaps the South Slavic sense is the original one and the Russian “caress” sense transferred from e.g., rocking or swinging a baby/child.
I’m still impressed by the numbers
They are based on the premise that if a country is officially Francophone, everyone speaks French; rather like counting the whole population of India as Anglophone. I note that the article also says “the country” when it should say “the capital city.” (They also assume that population growth in Africa will continue on much its present course, including among the – relatively privileged – speakers of the colonial languages. This seems improbable.)
Urbanisation is the major driver of switching to colonial languages, and urbanisation is proceeding apace. Based on what Etienne has told me previously, the switch to French is also more advanced than any switching to English in countries where that is the official language. Even so, these numbers are based solidly on the limited worldview of expats and évolués.
@DE, no, see here and more detailed here.
It is not L1. I tried a random country (Togo)… they take census 2010 (sait lire, écrire et
comprendre) and extrapolate. And you’re right (in that maybe I should not be impressed with these figures): this lire and écrire is not the same thing as regular use or even exposure (which definitely happens in Africa, but as you said, depends on various other things (other than just schooling)).
Also regular users of a langauge can be of several types: regular users of French in North Africa don’t use it as local lingua franca (no matter how thick is code-switching). Lebanese people too don’t need French to be understood by Lebanese even if their children prefer to answer in school in French or English rather than in fus·ha:)
Yeah, I deleted L1, after you made your comment (and before I saw yours.)
Censuses in African countries are not quite as reliable as in Europe, incidentally. At all.
In particular, they will, without a doubt, very significantly undercount rural and uneducated people. (It reminds me of the IMF’s brilliant idea that Ghana should raise taxes via VAT. These people have never seen an African market, not even through the tinted windows of their four-wheel drives on the way to the hotel …)
By the way, speaking of markets in Ghana: googling this brand (Vody) led me to an article about a different topic. Opening and closing paragraphs:
“Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang a former Education Minister under the Mahama administration has refurbished and commissioned the Komenda market. This gesture she said formed part of her duties owed to the women in the Constituency.
…
Present were Chiefs and Elders, Regional and Constituency Executives, the Member of Parliament for the KEEA constituency, Samuel Atta Mills, the hierarchy of the market led by the market Queen and many significant others who graced the occasion.”
Besides this very interesting evolution of “significant other” – what’s a market Queen?
(WP, “Komenda, Ghana” says: “In 2020, the Paramount Queenmother of Komenda was Nana Adwoa Badu II.[8] ” where [8] is a piece whose title is ‘With Naana as Vice-President, Komenda Sugar Factory will work again’ – Nana Adwoa Badu II and which begins: “The Paramount Queenmother of Komenda Traditional Area, Nana Adwoa Badu II, has lauded Former President John Dramani Mahama and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) for choosing Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang as the Running Mate for the 2020 general election.
She expressed optimism that with Prof Opoku Agyemang as the Vice President of Ghana, the Komenda Sugar Factory would work again and Komenda would take its position on the industrial map.“)
what’s a market Queen?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912423000330
Incidentally, Na(a)na means “chief.” It’s a help to be royal if you want to be a professor. Or an education minister. On the other hand, noblesse oblige is alive and well in Ghana.
Thank you! So when they taught market economy to Russians they did not warn us that to function properly it needs Queens:( That’s why everything goes to shit here!
Two other Romance languages where it is more indisputable that many many more L1 speakers live in the former colonies outside Europe than in the former metropole in Europe are Portuguese and Spanish. There must be a literature on how developments in the “overseas” varieties have or haven’t influenced the back-in-Iberia varieties, and how the timeline of that does or doesn’t match up with the shift in raw numbers.
1-Sigh.
Calling African French “creolized” is only true if creole=language contact, in which case “creole” and “natural language” are interchangeable synonyms.
2-I think I pointed out here at Casa hat that there are a couple of African countries where French is already the majority L1: Gabon, and possibly Congo-Brazzaville. The same is true of some African cities, such as Abidjan. The most Europeanized country of Africa, linguistically, is, I believe, Angola, where some three quarters of the country’s inhabitants speak Portuguese at home (which, come to think of it, contributes to making Portuguese the world’s most globalized language: it is now the national language with the lowest percentage -in relation to its total number of L1 speakers- of L1 speakers in its country of origin: 10 million in Portugal versus approximately 250 million outside Portugal: Comparing the demographics of Angola and Brazil with those of Portugal, this difference is going to keep growing for quite some time).
3-John Cowan made the point once that Singapore seems to be the only country where a majority of the population (which a couple of generations ago contained no L1 anglophones and a minority of L2 anglophones) is shifting to English and thus turning their country into a majority anglophone one. This is true, but in Africa both Lagos and Monrovia are major cities where a large number, possibly a majority, of (younger?) inhabitants are L1/dominant speakers of an English-based pidgin (now becoming a creole).
4-M is right to point out that it is by no means clear that African innovations will make their way into mainstream French, with J.W. Brewer pointing to Spanish and Portuguese as possible objects of comparison. In this light I cannot help but point out that for a long time a country such as Argentina was substantially richer than Spain itself, so that unless truly gargantuan transformations in the global economy take place in the near future I suspect the influence of overseas Spanish upon European Spanish has been considerably more pronounced than the influence of African French upon European French is liable to be.
5-Referring to the French language as “she” looks like a bad case of translationese: one would use “elle” in French solely because “la langue” is a feminine noun, and thus the proper English pronoun should be “it”.
Singapore seems to be the only country where a majority of the population (which a couple of generations ago contained no L1 anglophones and a minority of L2 anglophones) is shifting to English and thus turning their country into a majority anglophone one.
I don’t remember saying that, but it may well be so. That said (or not said), Singapore is the most urbanized country in the world.
mainstream French
The question is, which French is the mainstream? If the day comes when due to differential population growth there are ten or a hundred times as many L1 francophones in Africa as in Europe, it seems to me that African French will be the mainstream and European French will be, you should excuse the expression, a backwater.
Referring to the French language as “she” looks like a bad case of translationese: one would use “elle” in French solely because “la langue” is a feminine noun, and thus the proper English pronoun should be “it”.
Languages, like nations (and ships and bells) were traditionally referred to as “she” in English, though it was never incorrect and certainly is nowadays more common. Note also the idioms mother tongue and sister language.
If the day comes when due to differential population growth there are ten or a hundred times as many L1 francophones in Africa as in Europe, it seems to me that African French will be the mainstream and European French will be, you should excuse the expression, a backwater.
Not unless the differential population growth is accompanied by even more rapid economic growth – which would be great, but isn’t looking very likely.
John Cowan: As a native speaker of Quebec French, I assure you I have no skin in the game as to whether European French gets marginalized by African French or not: indeed, I freely admit that from a sociolinguistic point of view, the thought that France might one day be to Francophone Africa what Quebec is to France today is one I find more amusing than anything else. As amusing as the thought that mainstream American and British English might both likewise someday become socially marginalized/stigmatized varieties (with Nigerian or South Asian or some kind of koine of non-native forms of English becoming the new prestige variety?).
(A perfect world, to me, would be one where French is the global lingua franca and Quebec French THE prestige variety. Since such a world is rather unlikely to arise, I think I can take a somewhat detached view of such matters).
I agree with Lameen’s point that the demographic difference between France and francophone Africa would not in and of itself cause a rise in the prestige of the French spoken in the latter.
Indeed, the history of English seems to confirm this: the spectacular rise in the number of L2 English speakers over the past couple of generations has had little effect on L1 English. And the (earlier) shift in prestige from British to American English took place long after American English L1 speakers had come to outnumber L1 British English speakers. The trigger for this change was the economic rise of the United States and its taking over the British Empire’s former geopolitical position, not its (much earlier) becoming the demographically most important anglophone country.
the question of influence on place-of-origin lects doesn’t seem to me to have much to do with relative populations or economic strength. on the other hand, it seems pretty tightly connected to the level of presence of immigrant populations from former colonies in the former metropoles*, and to the lects most present in the emerging and dominant forms of popular culture within the place of origin. the presence of large african immigrant communities in france, and the rising influence over the last 50 years of hiphop, raï, and other genres rooted in those communities, seems to me the decisive factor for african frenches on european french-as-she-is-spoke. those are what affect everyday language, especially for younger people – whose speech is, after all, the best indicator of where a lect is headed.
i think something similar is being pretty actively not-said in a lot of accounts of changes in british and u.s. englishes, with, for example, “multicultural london english” (here, for example) being as close as things usually get to a non-euphemistic “u.k. caribbean & desi englishes”.
.
* which would indicate, actually, that influence is as likely to flow up an economic gradient as down it. which matches the overall pattern of u.s. englishes, where AAVE (and to a lesser extent working-class and immigrant englishes) has consistently been a, if not the, major source of language innovation in most lects.
Referring to the French language as “she” looks like a bad case of translationese
I was thinking that too, or maybe it’s romaticizing the romantic French: “ze language, she is magnifique.” On the other hand, in the sentence “French is about to make a big leap, and she’s wondering how it’s going to go,” is “French” likely to have been le français or la langue française?
Referring to the French language as “she” looks like a bad case of translationese: one would use “elle” in French solely because “la langue” is a feminine noun, and thus the proper English pronoun should be “it”.
Well, it’s not always that simple; “elle” can be used for a feminine noun but assume greater salience in particular contexts. I think of the opening sequence of Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, which has a title reading ELLE — LA RÉGION PARISIENNE and then (starting at 1:17) shows the lead actress while Godard whispers “Elle, c’est Marina Vlady. Elle est actrice.” Here, “she’s excited about where she’s headed” represents an equivalent personalization and I think justifies the personal pronoun in English.
Languages, like nations (and ships and bells) were traditionally referred to as “she” in English
Not in my idiolect. On the other hand, as Stu recently noted, I’m very hip and happening linguistically, so maybe I just don’t speak traditional. Squaresville, Daddy-O!
No doubt influenced by chouette.
Respect.
Pain au chocolat isn’t sickly-sweet, though. I’d call “sugary” an exaggeration. The point of it is the chocolate, not the sugar.
It’s also supposed to be part of the boyfriend…
Le lapin, ça aime le pain
et la lapine, ça aime… le pain aussi
is by no means completed. We’ve probably reached the point where more mainland Europeans learn AmE than BrE, but 20 years ago that wasn’t yet so.
I’m a mainland European who was taught British English as a child, 35 years ago, but is speaking generic global English now, I think. There’s been a lot of American influence. And from everywhere else.
Is it possible to separate the effects of American media (talking films and sound recordings) from that of American geopolitical rise? The latter would involve much less wide contact with American speech than with, say, product labels.
“She” is famously used as the pronoun thought appropriate when a language is the antecedent in the title of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke.
I follow both US and British media, probably equally. I’ve visited Britain but not the US. I have had a lot of interaction with US Americans, though. I dated one.
Then Trump happened. I met a person wearing a MAGA hat.
To follow up on my earlier comment, a quote from here:
“ELLE — LA RÉGION PARISIENNE”
LH, when a friend of mine was travelling, she asked me to feed her cats (and possibly live in her flat, if I like). She attached printed A4 notes to things (this one to be treated with care, and this one I should fix (the pc monitor which I could fix, take and consider mine), and this one I can use if I like).
And she reffered to things as “them”, e.g. e note could start with “they are chairs!”, thus speaking of them as persons.
“Two or Three Things I Know about Her misses … and the priority that the film gives to the former,”
In Russian it does not contain much “priority”. When you say “…I know about her” everyone thinks of a woman.
It is persons with whom a playful use of “she” as if we know who I’m talking about (without actual antecedent!) is possible, and it is persons with whom it is possible to say “she’s a princess” (rather than это принцесса) just because I know that you’re looking at her (an unfamiliar woman) at the moment.
“the question of influence on place-of-origin lects doesn’t seem to me to have much to do with relative populations or economic strength. ”
@rozele, English influence on Russian (and, say, popularity of rock’n’roll) is not mediated by immigration of L1 English speakers (or even L2 users) to Russia – so we clearly see that immigration is not the only scenario.
When two languages are mutually intelligible influence is not going to be weaker (though of course the less difference – the harder to observe this influence. An English grammatical borrowing into Russia is obvious, a borrowing of something way more subtle is not).
Economic strength can also mean wider presence of local culture and all sorts of contacts (think “French students go to Africa to study”).
“on the other hand, it seems pretty tightly connected to the level of presence of immigrant populations from former colonies in the former metropoles”
It occured to me when I said that I’m impressed by numbers. But I’m not confident that numbers as such won’t affect the ecosystem. Say, if Africa were just one village, no matter how developed it is, it hardly would influence France economically and it must be very lucky to exert cultural influence.
On a graph it would be but one vertice with several edges coming from there.
So why nothing changes when it is majority of speakers?
Also Africa is decentralised. Many states. Think “Europe”, think “Ancient Greece”.
Immigration-to-Europe–mediated influence is our present, but what will be future?
And raï too has to do not only with immigration. It is produced in Algeria and we know it not from French or Maghrebi diaspora. And as I said above, rock’n’roll is known here not because of immigrants.
Why African music is worse?
____
“Economy”, “music”, “immigration” – all these are parameters known to play some role. This does not mean that there are not more.
Also Europe is a bit fixated on immigration.
I am totally shocked and disgusted with how it is dealing with refugees. There are two issues: 1. refugees already in Europe. 2. refugees in general and around. Why should we do about them? Europe is all progressive when it comes to… integration (1.) Which is really nice. But when it comes to the second issue… It seems it adopted the view that was promoted by Russia (even though it does not say it aloud).
Another example of fixation would be the idea “exoticising is evil”. Exoticising may appear bad to immigrants. When you are Moroccan Norwegian you indeed are not very comfortable when locals don’t recognise you as a Norwegian. But people of “exotic” cultures willingly exoticise themselves when they are talking to foreigners.
Immigrant communities do deserve all this attention and more, but there are obviously things other than immigrants.
“It’s also supposed to be part of the boyfriend”
Not entirely clear because the gf by definition is its user and then in some ways owner. (If it were not unromantic, I’d add
of this means of production).(A perfect world, to me, would be one where French is the global lingua franca and Quebec French THE prestige variety. Since such a world is rather unlikely to arise, I think I can take a somewhat detached view of such matters)
A world which becomes uninhabitable at all latitudes less than 50 degrees, perhaps.
@drasvi:
i’m talking specifically about situations like the one described in the article, or in my british example, where influence within a group of lects conventionally grouped as a single language flows from lects considered peripheral towards ones considered central or defining (which is something that mainly happens in contexts structured by colonialism). englishes’ influence on russian(s) or french(es), or caribbean spanishes’ influence on u.s. englishes, are a completely different situation. raï is relevant to the extent that it incorporates french in its lyrics, as a result of colonization, and to the extent that it affects the frenches spoken in the maghreb, in maghrebi communities in france, and by non-maghrebi folks in france who listen to it or hang out with maghrebi folks who do.
and i’m certainly not saying numbers have no effect. but what matters for linguistic influence is the amount, and the shape, of contact (direct or mediated) between speakers of different lects. numbers don’t matter without contact, and contact can matter without numbers.
to give one small example in each direction (speaking only of cradle-tongue speakers in each case):
— there are about 500,000 speakers of plautdietsch/mennonite low german, among ~5 million low german speakers (<10%) or ~90 million german speakers (<0.5%) overall (pick your frame of reference). to my (admitedly limited) understanding, other german lects have not significantly influenced plautdietsch for the last century or two – except in germany and parts of latin america, the places where plautdietsch speakers are in regular contact with speakers of other germans.
— by contrast, there are under 5 million speakers of jamaican englishes* in the world (<1% of L1 english speakers), and under 1.5 million in the u.s. (<0.5%), but it's a good bet that at least 100 million u.s. english speakers know what "ganja" means, tens of millions have it in their active vocabulary, and a respectable percentage of those have at least a few more jamaican english items in their wordhoards.
like JWB, i'd be interested to know whether the influence of latinamerican spanishes and portugueses on their european cousin lects correlates with the relative populations of speakers. i'm inclined to doubt it, and to expect that it tracks the immigration flows (in these cases in both directions, especially as people fled fascist regimes in each direction) and popular culture flows that actually create situations of linguistic contact.
.
* in most contexts, i wouldn't call a lot of these jamaican lects english varieties any more than i'd call haitian kreyòl a variety of french, but i'm working with the framework of peltier's article. and english has the navy that matters in the jamaican colonial dynamic, while patwa is barely armed at all.
“and i’m certainly not saying numbers have no effect. but what matters for linguistic influence is the amount, and the shape, of contact (direct or mediated) between speakers of different lects. numbers don’t matter without contact, and contact can matter without numbers.”
I agree.
My idea was that francophone Africa is changing. A group of several countries united by a lingua franca looks like a setting where a new and interesting culture associated with this lingua franca may arise…
This hypothetical situation is comparable to that of Spanish.
As a possible counterexample, cf. India whose English indeed is not terribly influential. My own contacts with it are rather formal (science and local newspapers), Bollywood (a) lost popularity here (b) does not speak Enlgish (but does code-switch and borrow). Same for French in Arab countries: my own contacts with it are rather informal (because I know some locals) but it is not the language of local culture.
Countries themselves keep changing too, so the idea of extrapolating our current situation seems dubious – I simply don’t know what the new situation will look like.
“lapin” – “Alteration of lapereau, with change of suffix after connin, a word it replaced.”
Interesting.
lapereau – “From Middle French laperiau, lapriel, probably of Iberian origin (compare Portuguese láparo). See also Latin lepus, of same origin.”
connil – “Alternative forms conil, connin” – “From Vulgar Latin *cuniclus, from Latin cuniculus, from Ancient Greek κύνικλος (kúniklos), probably of Iberian origin.”
Another strange thing is the list of descendants of the Romance c-word (which meant female genitals anyway): numerous Germanic and Celtic dialects, enough to say, konyn is attested in Afrikaans and Cornish.
@LH, about my question about women-only Hugo and Nebula:
One of sites where Russian authors can publish and sell their novels online is author.today (moslty known because it advertises itself).
It is extremely hard to find there a good book and writers who publish one chapter a day are more popular. Honestly I find forum AD&D games played online more interesting (and better written) reading than most of the stuff there. Nevertheless if books are popular, it means somethign so maybe I should just say they are not novels:)
When you search for books by popularity, authors are almost exclusively men.
But their contests are… dominated by women*.
I did not like your explanation for absence of men among Hugo and Nebula nominees (it has changed already): excluding men is silly and provokes misogyny.
But it would be highly unusual for a Russian contest to be ideologised or feminist or whatever.
Consider the recent contest of Russian wuxia:
https://author.today/contest/30/results – girls
complete list of participants
https://author.today/contest/30/works – mostly boys
and books in the genre sorted by popularity
https://author.today/work/genre/wuxia/ – boys
So my hypothesis is (again) that there are other reasons for this change in demography of award winners. (and I repeat again that the Internet also changed a lot for, say, Middle Eastern women).
P.S. actually a direct comparison with Hugo is impossible and maybe I’m wrong: most of stuff on the site is written in rather clumsy Russian, while well-written books may contain more than one error per a paragraph. If the former is especially common for men and the latter is taken into account, I can see how boys can lose. Russian men indeed are good at not giving a shit.
(Compare my English)
I did not like your explanation for absence of men among Hugo and Nebula nominees (it has changed already): excluding men is silly and provokes misogyny.
You either misremembered or misunderstood my explanation (not an unusual situation). Nobody excluded men. The Hugo voters happened to like a lot of works by women in those years. You are imagining some sort of anti-male conspiracy.
“You are imagining some sort of anti-male conspiracy.”
No, I’m saying quite the opposite: that it is NOT just an anti-male conspiracy that lead to this.
“You either misremembered or misunderstood my explanation (not an unusual situation).”
Sorry, I just tried to describe the reason why I “don’t like” it very briefly.
Of course they did not “exclude” men.
But if they gave women so much support that it became impossible for men to compete – as a reaction to some silly event from several years before and male sexism in general – and then kept doing it for years, then it would be a feat of extreme stupidity. No, not an anti-male conspiracy.*
And this is more or less what you suggested: reaction. AND appearance of a number of good female writers as a second reason.
What I suggest is exactly that they happened to like a lot of works by women, and that possible reaction or feminism or whatever might not be the main reason for this.
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*Perhaps you don’t understand, but what bothers me about such actions is not that they will somehow “weaken” the position of men.
There are of course multiple dimensions in which language variety A may or may not influence language variety B. The “uphill” (in socioeconomic terms) vector that rozele is talking about generally appears most productive in spreading new lexical items to the seemingly dominant/prestige variety, but rather less so in affecting e.g. syntax or pronunciation in that variety. Even if a “catch phrase” moves uphill and has embedded in it some non-standard (from a prestige perspective) syntax and pronunciation as well as lexemes, it seems comparatively unlikely that the prestige-variety speakers will then generalize that syntax and pronunciation and use it more broadly?
@LH, please, note: I did not say
“I did not like your explanation for absence of men among Hugo and Nebula nominees… : excluding men.”
as if I’m quoting your explanation. I said:
“I did not like your explanation for absence of men among Hugo and Nebula nominees…. : excluding men IS silly”
Sorry, it indeed looks like your explanation was that they tried to exclude men. But I would not try to retell your explanation in this manner. I was trying to give an explanation of MY reasons to dislike the situation and I was trying to make it as short as possible, which resulted in this formulation.
And of course I am giving the example of a Russian site (where an anti-male conspiracy is hardly possible) NOT to demonstrate anti-male conspiracy.
Superficial intelligibility
Words strung together in unidiomatic fashion, difficult to understand – that previously could be an indicator of computer-generated text, but of course also of insufficient mastery of the language or the subject matter, or of “cognitive dysfunction” (perhaps temporary, as in inebriation), and of other possibilities.
Such productions could be said to be superficially unintelligible.
All speech/text producers could be cut some slack one way or another – computers were said to be *not yet* sufficiently advanced. People were recommended to attend night school or take courses in rhetoric, or dry out overnight in a cell.
Now these new-fangled samplers of LLMs produce texts that are superficially intelligible – just as sober citizens do. Few incongruent choices of words, few if any grammar mistakes, everything seems to fit together from sentence to sentence.
A lot of people seem to be very upset about this, and conjure the specter of “artificial intelligence”. aI think what they are upset about is that now it is crystal clear that what counts is not merely what is said, but what the hearer makes of it. Take Pokorny, the oracle at Delphi or Trump (who does not drink alcohol) – whether they float your boat is up to you, dears.
Would you buy the Brooklyn bridge from any old plausible tenderer ?
“Exclusion of men” was just the effect – and a known effect. Someone who supported women just because they are women should have stopped doing so as soon as she noticed that men are not getting nominated at all. Else it is silly and promotes misogyny, given that the genre was previously seen as male and open misogyny is already widespread. (Just clarifying)
But my suggestion is that many people actually liked the novels. I know, you sympathise to feminists. It is not exactly what I feel about them. Feminists, anti-racists and so on. My attitude to them is not unlike my attitude to religious people (I am a believer): I do not authomatically approve what they do.
But if they gave women so much support that it became impossible for men to compete – as a reaction to some silly event from several years before and male sexism in general – and then kept doing it for years, then it would be a feat of extreme stupidity.
Good thing that didn’t happen.
LH, yet I think it is what you suggested.
Yes, good thing.
(Note, I do not think it is wrong to support women just because they are women. It is all right as long as they are minority and you want to encourage more women (both readers and writers) to join. As for “several years”: 2019-2021, Hugo: one nominee who does not identify as woman, Yoon Ha Lee (2019))
yet I think it is what you suggested.
No, it is not.
Well, all right.
Anyway: I wrote that post because I was glad to see all those girls in this and other contests – and I’m generally very interested in how visibility and participation (in ‘gendered’ activities) of men or women evolves and changes.
But it seems otherwise men are overrepresented on the site (which actually allows some of popular amateur authors to make writing their profession) compared to what I expect from self-published novels.
*chuckle*
generally appears most productive in spreading new lexical items to the seemingly dominant/prestige variety, but rather less so in affecting e.g. syntax or pronunciation in that variety.
absolutely!
though i do think that there are some interesting things in the latter category. there’s the incorporation of a range of elements of other lects within limited registers and scopes of use (invariant “be” and stressed “been” from AAVE are ones i hear pretty regularly from otherwise so-called-standard u.s. english speakers). and i wonder about the origins of the /f/ in some british englishes where u.s. ones generally have /θ/ – i certainly first heard it from black british english-speakers and now do from a much wider demographic range, but i don’t know what its actual trajectory has been. and then, of course, there’s shm-reduplication, which has a meaningful foothold beyond speakers (or even regular hearers) of yiddishized englishes.
That’s a stereotypical Cockney feature, so it’s probably a local innovation parallel to those of, I would guess, numerous Caribbean ones.
…it occurs far north of Cockney, too, though. There’s a YouTuber with that feature (plus /ð/ > /v/) who lacks the FOOT-STRUT split.
I think “/ð/ > /v/” is also a stereotypical Cockneyism, or at least I’ve read set-in-England works where characters say eye-dialect “bovver” for “bother” so you get what their class background is supposed to be. In Dickens, by contrast, /w/ > /v/ is a Cockneyism, as when Sam Weller refers to himself as “Veller.” Only time I can recall hearing that in real life was from the mouth of a local white speaker in the Bahamas.
TH-Fronting
“A muvver was barfin’ ’er biby one night…”
Oh – Yorkshire, documented since 1876.
Oh, I missed it but Burkina Faso (a few days ago) and Mali earlier renamed French from “official” to “working” language.
@DM Pain au chocolat isn’t sickly-sweet, though.
In France, quite true. But perhaps you’ve not come across ‘Danish pastries’ (I’m not saying they have much to do with Denmark[**]) in which everything is covered in a sticky sugary glaze, the au is often dropped, and the chocolat is not bitter-dark — and in some cases I suspect not even chocolate.
[**] The smoking gun is pointing at this being American influence — from chain outlets claiming to retail coffee but in fact more likely to sell any amount of sugar-laced frothy milk.
Of course, Americans know them as “chocolate croissants” if they know them at all.
They are not of course crescent-shaped, but then most crescent-shaped things are not growing. New meanings develop.
So do I blame Starbucks? Up until five or ten years ago, Danish bakers sold croissants and pains au chocolat very much on the French pattern (moderately sweet puff pastry, dark chocolate, no glacing or nasal vowels). Then one by one they all changed the name of the latter to chokoladecroissant (but not the recipe). There may be a few holdouts.
The owner of my local baker shop was of the opinion that Danes were more self conscious about pronouncing pain right than croissant [kʰʁ̤ɔɑ.sɑŋ] so they would order more often with the new name. She may have had a point, the mismatch between Danish and French phonologies are more obvious in the shorter word.
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(*) I put breathy voicing on the ʁ̤ because in that position it’s not nearly as strongly voiced as the French one, if not fully devoiced. But I’m pretty sure it’s phonemically a voiced segment, not χ.
there are other French names, like chocolatine…
I admit that I haven’t researched the French market for baked goods in depth, nor the names used, though I did have a nice croissant in Paris two weeks ago. I did note that the shop (Du Pain et des idées) had spiral pastries called escargots, much reminiscent of Danish snegle = ‘snails’. It was half eight in the morning and I didn’t feel up to mustering enough French to investigate if there is a relation.
(Incidentally, they get their coffee beans from an artisanal roastery half a mile from my home in Copenhagen. There are no coincidences).
Oh, it gets fully devoiced in French. /r/ is no longer phonemically specified for voice in most of Uvular-R French; it takes its voice from its surroundings.
pain choco:
There was a pop song here, as it was performed by a black singer, the lyricist (a lady, author of such chefs’d oeuvre as musy-pusy /musi-pusi/… ) chose to play on his black skin and general curiousity of Russian girls about black guys. It went “I’m a chocolate hare and when I touch your lips i melt so easily”. Was VERY annoying, which I assume is a mark of success.
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Though speaking seriously, I wonder if Africans – in absence of white-skinned people to compare – are as oblivious to “human body colour”, that is brown, as Europeans.
In Russians we have “body colour”, but it describes a very specific shade and is used relatively radely (to describe objects like chairs or articles of clothing). Wiktionary informs me that English “bodycolour” simply means Gouache… Surprises me, because it can be any colour. Then there are poetic descriptions of some fair maiden’s skin as white, or moonlike or whatever (a different story, because it is based on the assumption that the whiter a maiden is, the better).
But I don’t know, maybe brown is actually salient enough (e.g. to make “choco” and other references to brown work as a reference to “a person”?)
@Lars Mathiesen: Previous discussions of “snail” pastries in English.
@drasvi: Bloom County on the meaning of flesh tones.
Aha, flesh! I should have thought about it!
Just spotted a pack of “mini croissants” by 7 Days with chocolotate cream filling. In Russian the wording is cautious: “with creme ‘Cacao'”. (“The form cocoa by confusion with coco, popularized by Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language.” informs me Wiktionary, I did not know that.)
I wonder if Africans – in absence of white-skinned people to compare – are as oblivious to “human body colour”, that is brown
No. Western Oti-Volta speakers are typically darker-skinned than southern Ghanaians, whose skin colour they call “red”, i.e. “brown” (these languages have just three basic colour terms.) “Black” is what people are by default, though.
It must be an old usage: as I’ve said before, the ancestor of the Mossi-Dagomba royal clans is called the “Red Hunter” traditionally. (He is supposed to have come from the area of Lake Chad.)
Not many dictionaries have “albino”, and the words I have found seem to be unrelated to one another, apart from Buli zaatu and Mooré zaato. Kröger says of the Buli “loan from Hausa”, but he’s often wrong about the source of loans, and the Hausa word is actually zabiya. Loan from Mooré, more like.
@DE, well, by oblivious I mean: we know that foxes are red, and blondes are blonde and brunettes are dark-haired. But we don’t associate the [usual for Europe] colour of human body with anything, we only think of it when looking at a person or when describing a person. (We don’t think: “roses are red, humans [European] are pink/yellow/white, violets are blue”, though I can imagine one adding foxes or blondes to this list, and a European can add Africans as representatives of black and Africans can likely add Europeans as representatives of white)
I just don’t know if the same is true for Africans. I would expect it to be the same (based on neutrality of one’s own colour), but can’t be sure.
Didn’t he just answer that question? Or what exactly do you mean?
LH, I just tried to clarify my “oblivious”. I think DE answered a related question, but I did not mean to insist on more answers (if you mean that).
I mean I don’t understand what your original question was if DE didn’t answer it. You asked if Africans are oblivious to “human body colour,” and he said “No,” with examples.
Because I was thinking aloud.
I see that colours of people are somehow “neutral” for me, but it is difficult to explain how. I was trying to formulate it. I’m not sure if DE understood my “oblivious” so I was doing it aloud.
DE speaks about difference in colour. I don’t know how exactly this “red” and “black” functions, but we here too compare lighter people in the north to darker people in the south.
We are not oblivious when it comes to comparing humans to humans.
But it is not how my beard is black. It is not how a fox is red. Not merely when you compare a fox to another fox (which actually happens to be red too): you strongly associate the concept of being red with foxes.
So I initially assumed that this neutrality is a global universal: when you need a metaphor or a pet name for your girlfriend, you won’t take an extra effort to make colours match IF her colour is more or less the same as yours (might be different in a multiracial society – or not, but Russia is quite homogenous). “Choco” is just as good as anything. I assumed the same is true for an African and anyone… and then realised that as with all other univesals I can’t be sure:/