“Our children say wesh?” Thank them! »»

VOs children, your students say “wesh”? Would you like to correct this bad habit to save these young people? To save society? To save the language itself? You would not be the first. To me, who made a thesis on the ways of talking about young people, we have often explained that my work would be complicated because young people no longer know how to speak. The young people themselves shared this opinion. By returning to college to collect data in contact, I was able to present my subject to them. Their answer remained to me: “Our language to us is not French. »» Sacred goal against their camp.

Once my thesis is finished – the subject was ultimately possible – I have often thought about these reactions. Why these alarmist speeches? Look, however,: two years later, no one says “whatever” and the French language has not disintegrated. Young people have their habits, constantly renewed, in terms of language. Words appear, disappear, change in shape or use, continuously. More rarely, we see syntactic turns, prefixes or suffixes, pronunciations, intonations. Whether you understand them or not, rest assured, it’s French. Are your children, your students say “wesh”? So much the better !

Let’s start by recalling the essentials: young people do not speak another language. Not only do they not all speak in the same way, but above all none use exactly the same words with friends, parents, teachers, sports educators, as well as adults modulate according to the context. Young people adapt … and persist in speaking French. Even when a turn escapes us in a dialogue between young people, we do not understand anything: syntax, grammar and pronunciation remain in accordance with the most usual standard of French.

Create new words

The NeoLECTES association precisely lists these new uses and relays real examples. Let’s see these examples: “I got tunnelized by a cryptocurrency specialist”, “On the way to barbarate my barbapartials”, “I spent the whole evening acquiesce without reacting, a little in PNJ mode”. If you do not understand these sentences, it is undoubtedly that you do not understand “tunnery”, “barba-” or “in NPC mode”. That’s it. The rest is perfectly commonplace. Is misunderstanding really so great or does the discomfort come from a fear of novelty? Difference?

The novelty and difference are however necessary. Creating new words is used to designate new things (no, a date is not quite a date), more rarely to encrypt messages or have fun: adults also do all these things. Adolescence is an age where we also seek to build our identity: you don’t dress like your parents, you don’t listen to the same music, why would we speak in the same way? Forging your identity by speaking is natural. Young people need social ties to their peers, to recognize members of their group by distinguishing themselves from others (parents, teachers, younger children, etc.). The adults also did it, their parents reproached them for them, themselves had done so. At this rate, we can go back four centuries back. So let the young people talk: they grow up.

Don’t you understand what your children say? Simply ask them, without wonder or peremptory judgment. It is a rare opportunity to reverse the roles: the young person has knowledge and the adult does not have it. It is up to the adult to seize it to stimulate the intelligence of the young person. In this way we fight against a feeling of domination and linguistic insecurity. Make young people believe that their language, as my college informants have entrusted to me, “It’s not French”it is simply silenced.

Democratic issue

Letting young people speak is also a democratic issue. They are not equal in the face of school language: if they come from a favored family, to culture schoolly valued, then they will be able to manipulate the whole range of possible uses, they will know what to say and not to say in front of a teacher. If they come on the contrary from a family disadvantaged to delegitimized culture, they will leave from afar. The lack of diversity between colleges and even, now, between classes, nourishes these inequalities.

Fashionable words, on the other hand, come to counter them. Encouraging their ways of speaking is therefore the best way to give them confidence and enhance the skills they can all have. Let us show them that, vocabulary, they have it. Why deprive ourselves of reducing the inequalities between young people, if not by elitism and out of contempt?

Letting young people speak is important, finally, for the language itself. Finally, let’s question ourselves about this. Our reactions to the evolutions of the language are irrational and unhealthy. The French Academy publishes a dictionary of rare needy? The President of the Republic famous. Some are resistant to linguistic change which is the essence of any living language? They are called purists. We offer a timid reform of circumflex accents and union traits that have become obsolete? Thirty-five years later, it is still not applied. The use of a punctuation sign like the median point develops? Some elected officials would like to sanction it criminally. Perhaps it is time to put an end to these moral panics from another century and to leave the young people with the place. I rather thank them: they make our language a living language.