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9.13: Social Media Frenches - on se présente en émojis

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    263021

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    ** Potential ADAPT/H5P problem

    Zouzoukwa is an app created by a 22 year-old student in Abidjan that features a new series of emojis that reflects the local traditions, colors and heritage in West Africa.

    Step 1. Visit Zouzoukwa’s Instagram and examine some of the emojis and accompanying text you see on display.

    Step 2. What 5 recurring themes or topics do you see reflected in the emojis proposed by this account?

    Recurring themes / topics

    Step 3. Now select one emoji from each of the above 5 themes/topics you identified and read its caption. Enter the following information below.

    Theme

    Emoji name

    Description of item

    Countries mentioned

           
           
           
           
           

    Step 4. Application

    Imagine you landed an internship doing branding and social media for your local tourism board. What emojis would you propose to represent each of the following concepts? (these emojis do not need to already exist)

    Step 5. Examine the emojis/concepts you proposed for each group. Organize them into groups according to the themes you observed above. Which themes are best represented in your choices? Why do you think that is?

    Step 6. Have you ever designed your own emoji? Why or why not?

    Variations sociales : la tech et l’anglais

    New words can enter languages in a multitude of ways, one of which is through the borrowing of cultural concepts that arise when people are in contact with each other in physical or virtual spaces. This is how 21st-century varieties of French (and English and many other languages!) come to contain words like sushi (from Japanese), graffiti (from Italian), patio (from Spanish), and taekwondo (from Korean). Often times, when a new object is invented that is popular in a variety of cultures, the name of that object will be borrowed right along with it and not translated into the borrowing language, e.g. a PlayStation (=a gaming console) is called une playstation in French (made up of English parts) and not translated into French components.

    Because many recent advancements in technology have come about in English-speaking places, a lot of the terms we use to refer to them have also remained in English. Things like selfie, email, smartphone, hashtag…the list goes on and on. Speakers of varieties of World Frenches have taken up these words and adapted them into their languages without missing a beat: in the case of French, un selfie, un email, un smartphone, un hashtag, constituting what we know to be a garden variety case of lexical (=word) borrowing. However, some languages, particularly those that are well established and have been standardized for a long time, have protective bodies (=organizations made up of people) that intervene to try and slow the cross-pollination that happens naturally across languages.

    In France, there is the CELF (Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française), which works in tandem with the Académie Française, and in Quebec, the OQLF (l’Office québécois de la langue française). In recent years, both groups have worked to propose French equivalents for English borrowings, using only words that come from historically French sources, as a way to keep the language *linguistically pure*. Such attempts to regulate the language, however, are often viewed for what they really are: thinly veiled attempts to instead control who gets to participate in francophone culture and whose voice gets awarded the prestige. Language contact and language change are, of course, inevitable, and in many cases, these proposed terms have garnered more laughs than lip service from French-speaking communities.

    ** Potential ADAPT/H5P problem

    Check out the following list of English tech borrowings in French and try to pair them with their *French* equivalents.

    __ un smartphone a. le clavardage (clavier + bavardage)

    __ un email b. un courriel (courrier + électronique)

    __ le hashtag c. un égoportrait

    __ le fact checking d. un hyperjoueur

    __ un selfie e. le visionnage boulimique

    __ le chat f. un téléphone intelligent

    __ le binge-watching g. le mot-dièse

    __ un hardcore gamer h. la vérification des faits

    Now pick your top 3 and do a targeted Google search (i.e. search with the French term in quotes) to see how much each one is in use on the internet, in what contexts and in what varieties of World Frenches.

    Eng-based term / Fr-based term

    # of hits in google search

    Contexts / varieties

    1.

    		    

    2.

    		   

    3.

    		    

    Do you have a favorite French equivalent of a tech borrowing from English from the above list? Why (not)? Which one?

    How do the other languages you speak express the above concepts? Do they borrow the English terms? Do they have native equivalents? Explain.

    This page titled 9.13: Social Media Frenches - on se présente en émojis is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Géraldine Blattner, Amanda Dalola, and Stéphanie Roulon via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.