You may have noticed lately that your teen has a tendency to change “t”s to “tch” and “d”s to “dj”.
He is not the only one and this trend has a name: affrication.
This involves marking the consonants excessively, to the point of creating a friction effect.
According to linguist Maria Candea, interviewed by Libération, this type of phonetics is increasingly practiced by middle and high school students.
“It’s a sound that exists in different languages, including Spanish and Italian.
It was also used in old French,” underlines Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, linguist at Aix Marseille University.
In Quebec too, affrication has made a place for itself, but across the Atlantic the “d” are transformed into “dz” and the “t” into “ts”.
Thus, “tulipe” becomes “tsulipe” and “direct” turns into “dzirect”.
A Marseille influence?
Although widely used in the Phocaean city, affrication would not necessarily have originated around the Old Port.
“It rather has its origins in popular circles.
Marseille is the popular city par excellence, which explains why affrication is widely used there.
A few years ago, it was even considered that this was the way of speaking in the northern districts.
But in the 1980s, we noticed that affrication was also used in Grenoble or in certain districts of the Paris region,” explains the author of
Say it again in Marseillais
.
The Great Replacement does not exist.
pic.twitter.com/p6KT0dnlJG
— Eric Zemmour (@ZemmourEric) January 15, 2024
Contrary to what Éric Zemmour said on X, affrication has nothing to do with an Africanization of the French language either.
“The pieds noirs participated in bringing affrication back to the French language in the 1960s. But contrary to what one might think, the pieds noirs did not take this habit from Arabic, since there is no no affrication in the Arabic language, but rather Spanish or Italian,” explains Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus.
Today, it is notably the icons of Marseille rap - Jul, SCH and Naps in the lead - who participate in the dissemination of this way of speaking.
“Popular culture and social networks have allowed this way of speaking to spread more widely and more quickly,” specifies the Marseille linguist.
New words or new pronunciations, it is no coincidence that young people are often at the initiative of developments in the language.
“In adolescence, language is also a way of asserting oneself, of resembling one's social group and of differentiating oneself from parents,” explains Mary Catherine Lavissière, linguist and professor at the University of Nantes.
But be careful, evolution is far from being synonymous with decline and “language has never been something fixed,” insists Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus.