French suburban argot becomes main youth lingo: 'C'est Ouf!'

When a suburban youth says “boite de six,” he means a police van packed with cops like a box of six chicken nuggets. “J’te kiffe” translates as “I fancy you.” France is so abuzz with this argot — a mix of Arabic, Bambara, English and French — that 10 youths from Paris’s outskirts have compiled a 241-word dictionary of suburban lingo, complete with cartoons and etymology.

“These words are our identity,” said Franck Longepied, 25, one of the authors of the book, entitled “Lexik des Cites.” “We create, twist and extract words.”

The lingo is slipping out of the “banlieues,” as the French suburbs are called, and into the vernacular of mainstream youth. That worries the language police at the Academie Francaise, the institute created in 1635 “to protect the French language.” Although not judging this new development, the Academie is looking “closely” at the issue, said Jean-Mathieu Pasqualini, an official at the institute.

“This phenomenon can’t be ignored,” said Pasqualini, who coordinates the renewal of the official French dictionary.

Helene Carrere d’Encausse, the academy’s secretary for life, said in a 2006 speech that the language “one hears in the streets and on the radio waves is deplorable and impoverished.” The dictionary, renewed every 50 years, can’t be a “conglomerate of fashionable words,” she said.

The academy may be swimming against a tidal wave.

In many schools, teachers have found that children are more comfortable with slang than with mastering formal French. The growing weakness in written and spoken French is raising concern that students’ employment prospects will be limited. Youth unemployment in the suburbs is about 40 percent, twice the national average.

As terms like “c’est ouf” find their way into the common parlance of teens in Paris, Dijon and Bordeaux, educators worry that issues that have exacerbated suburban youth joblessness will spread to other parts of the country. The relentless use of the lingo on television and radio, in cell-phone messages and in teen magazines isn’t helping.

A stroll down La Canebiere, a central shopping street in the seafront city of Marseille, or past the gates of the Montaigne high school in Paris’s upscale 6th arrondissement shows that the phrases have become commonplace. The French edition of Elle magazine wrote last month, “Ask a mother if she hasn’t heard her teenager come back home and say, `J’ai trop le seum!’ or `I’m really mad!”’

The Academie Francaise fears the language issue will widen rifts within the country’s population.

“We have to be very careful that, because of poorer language coming on top of discrimination, we don’t see a real split in the French population in 10, 15 years,” Pasqualini said.

The academy has pledged since 2002 to push the national education system to improve the curriculum, which it says has let standards slip in the teaching of the French language. The rift between the banlieues and the rest of the French population was evident two years ago, when more than 10,000 cars and 200 buildings were torched or damaged in the suburbs in one of France’s most devastating riots.

President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to better integrate the suburbs with a “Marshall Plan,” referring to the U.S.-driven reconstruction fund for Europe after the Second World War.

Sarkozy appointed Fadela Amara, a longtime suburban activist, as secretary of state for urban affairs. In a weekly cabinet meeting, she addressed Sarkozy in suburban lingo, saying, “Il faut y aller a donf!” or “We’ve got to go all the way!” to help the banlieues, according to the government’s spokesman Laurent Wauquiez.

Her words echo those of Jamel Debbouze, Diam’s, Disiz la Peste and Abdel Malik, top-of-the-charts French rappers, singers and stand-up comedians from the suburbs who have sold more DVDs and songs than most other French-language artists.

Slang creeping into daily parlance is not new in France. The formula that suburban youth apply originates from the more than 400-year-old “verlan,” which inverts syllables and uses similes and metaphors to create new words.

What’s different now is the variety of sources from which words and references are drawn. The multicultural populations of the suburbs — mostly Arab and African — have made the argot more complex and inaccessible. Hence the new book by independent publisher Fleuve Noir. With 34,000 copies, the book, released last month, is in its third print. `Tomorrow’s France’

Longepied and his nine co-authors come from a “cite” —a term used for projects in the low-income suburbs — called Bois Sauvage in the town of Evry, 23 miles southeast Paris. Their dictionary is a visual depiction of youth culture: bright colors, graffiti-style artwork and black-and-white cartoon characters.

Sitting next to Longepied during a recent interview in the northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles was 25-year-old Cedric Nagau, a banlieue youth.

“This is tomorrow’s France,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean we exclude ourselves from the rest of the country. Our book is meant to reach out to them.”

For Longepied, it’s a question of celebrating diversity in France.

“Let’s put it this way, our words are just so much more creative,” he said.