FIEVET ANNE-CAROLINE

CONTEMPORARY URBAN FRENCH IN YOUTH RADIO PROGRAMS

 

Every night between 9 pm and midnight, young people call radio stations for a chance to speak on the air, talk with the presenters and often ask their advice. Linguistic analysis of a corpus of these open microphone programs recorded from 3 national stations for young people, namely Fun Radio, NRJ and Skyrock show that contemporary urban French and its speakers are perceived differently depending on the three different radio stations. On Fun Radio, the speaker of contemporary urban French is stigmatised whereas on NRJ the numerous verlan words used by the presenter are used to appear cool and not to attract young people from the suburbs. Only Skyrock leaves the young people to speak freely and to participate in the diffusion of new words from contemporary urban French into the youth slang of the moment.

Mots clés
Youth phone-in radio programs, Contemporary urban French, Youth slang.