Secret codes, dead languages, faction jargons or caste sabir: this series focuses on decoding obscure languages from yesterday to today. Another case: the heterolingualism of Montreal rap.
OK, wallahit begins and let’s go, patne !
The tune of Quebec rapper Tizzo (a reference to his small size, his little bones) on the album St. Patrick’s Whisk (2019) is called Chill?. It goes as follows: “She wanted fucking / She has plank / Poor her, she just wanted to smoke a dank / She thought it was a prank / No merguez for your schneck / Pass your ass / Shake your krek. You have to know how to decode to understand everything, including vulgarities.
The Montreal group Nomadic Massive pushes linguistic crossbreeding even further by alternating French, English, Arabic, Creole and Spanish. Boogát also masters his flow jumping from one language to another: Tú tienes un camina’o / Que tiene endemonia’o /¡wow! ¡wow! ¡wow! / It’s you over there that we gas up her pony / Single line-up means you are lonelywow / last call At shopping mall. »
So sometimes goes here the expression in the most popular musical genre of the last decades. “The fact that all languages can rhyme with each other allows great freedom to the author; he can thus exponentially multiply the ways of shaping ideas; using other languages also makes it possible to create cultural bridges”, summarizes the artist Webster in In the shade of the leaves. hip hop writing manual (Quebec America, 2019).
The result — poetic, inventive, original and, to tell the truth, unique in the world — is nonetheless disconcerting for the average human being and the basic French-speaker, including for some Quebecers. Can we therefore speak of a jargon?
“If you really want to grasp the scope of each verse of each song, you have to understand this insider language, this somewhat secret code”, answers the young researcher Frédéric Giguère, a specialist in Quebec hip-hop. “At the same time, you don’t need a very advanced linguistic skill to grasp the whole thing and appreciate it. »
heterolingualism
English-speaking linguists do describe the mixing of languages as code switching, code-switching. The linguist Rainier Grutman proposed the term heterolinguism to designate the presence in a text of foreign idioms.
THE code switching describes the change of language in speech; heterolingualism focuses on written texts. Rap is sung, of course, but most often it is written first. The term heterolingualism is also more neutral than the term bilingualism: it allows the poetic and aesthetic analysis of a text without adopting a political posture.
Frédéric Giguère, attached to the Department of French Studies at the University of Waterloo, defended in 2020 a dissertation specifically on “heterolinguism in contemporary Quebec rap”. There he studied the texts of Loud, FouKi, Koriass, Alaclair Ensemble or the Dead Obies to dissect the way of handling and mixing the two official languages.
“English never comes to take over, to take the place of French, in the texts that I have studied,” he says. Most often, the base of the text remains in French and the English sticks to it temporarily, briefly. »
The researcher did the accounts, word by word. In All that for this, from Loud, 20% of the lyrics come from English. Which gives for example in the song Without making a fuss : ” But sorry I missed my flight “. In The night of the long knives, Koriass cut borrowings to 16%. On the other hand, the album Gesamtkunstwerk (2016) by Dead Obies is almost sung equally in both official languages: “ Stand-bythat’s when you want / Just let me get high‘tend ti little, man…” (waiting).
This Franglais has been described by chroniclers as a symptom of the impoverishment of French in Quebec, proof of the “chiacquisation” of Quebec French, “a Creole that almost no one is able to understand”. The recent publicity of the CAQ government full of Anglicisms and comparing the state of French to an endangered species (“The peregrine falcon, recognized for being quite chill “) added.
Similarly, Mr. Giguère’s academic work is entitled What if Lord Durham was right?, an assumed provocation. “It’s ironic,” he said. I chose to talk about heterolinguism precisely to distance myself from political controversies, to go beyond this debate. »
Language of artists, language of the street
Hip-hop also often leads to controversy around the culture of violence. THE gangsta rap also exists here. Six rappers have been shot or stabbed to death in Montreal since July 2021. Three others were victims of an assassination attempt during the same short period.
Mr. Giguère himself has not explored the relationship between the language of artists and that of the street, but other researchers have shown that young Montrealers of the rap generation invent a new hybrid and mixed language, amalgamating languages and diverse cultures, on a daily basis as well as in songs.
An original situation that stems from the contribution of immigration and the obligation to educate newcomers in French under Bill 101.
“Those who write raps in Quebec can do so in French, in English, in other languages or in a mixed language. Ethnic origin, skin color, language, variety of language or accent are a source of wealth and are not binding. Hip-hop is a culture and a movement that is accessible to everyone; it’s just about wanting to contribute to it and doing it in an authentic spirit of keep it real. You cannot find a movement that is more open to diversity”, summed up in 2008 the researcher Mela Sarkar, from McGill University, in her article “Ousqu’on chill a night ? on multilingual practices as identity strategies in the hip-hop community.
Still from Waterloo, Mr. Giguère continues his research on rap in the greater Montreal region as part of his doctorate. It expands the reference corpus and extends it over two decades to observe its variations. His object of study offers many interesting angles, he says, such as observing more underground rap or sampling in songs, for example. The study of the production of other bilingual cities (like Brussels) or multicultural ones (like Dakar or Libreville) could also allow rich comparisons with Montreal.