French as It’s Now Really Spoken

An American in Paris discovers a language that’s part English, part African, part Arabic—and fully French

France’s younger generation uses a new vocabulary with multicultural origins. PHOTO:VINCENT ROSENBLATT

By

John von Sothen, The Wall Street Journal, 

May 3, 2019 5:30 a.m. ET

I’ve lived in France long enough now to realize the French never really say oui like we think they say it. More often than not, they pronounce it wayh, and it’s usually with an inhale, as if they’re talking while taking a drag on a cigarette. Which is often the case. 

But starting around 2015, what I heard from my daughter Bibi and my son Otto had nothing to do with oui or wayh. They were saying wesh. 

Wesh wasn’t quite the same “yes” one would use to respond to a question—it had a few variants and was often a tack-on word to something said before. T’es nul wesh (you suck, you know), Bibi would remind Otto at breakfast. Ta gueule wesh (shut up, OK?), Otto would then respond while slurping his cereal. 

Wesh, I learned, is a derivative of oui mixed with the Algerian and Moroccan Berber expression ach, which means “what.” Wherever or however you want to say it, wesh has taken over the French language, and it’s become the most emblematic expression of urban French. If you listen to a conversation of kids in my neighborhood, it’s possible you may hear four or five weshes per minute. It’s in every rap song. A lot of reality TV stars or soccer stars drop wesh here and there, and since these are the people my son and I both idolize, I want to speak like them. 

But wesh and other slang words stir up a strong reaction in many French speakers. Éric Zemmour, a best-selling French writer and political commentator, wrote in Le Figaro last year that the “French language is a masterpiece in peril,” and that linguistic change is “set on destroying, one after the other, our secular institutions of French identity.”

‘Wesh’ has been ushered into our house with myriad other words I never would have thought would work in France.

When you look up wesh in Wiktionnaire, the online Francophone dictionary, the definition is accompanied by a note: “spoken by a certain population [living in] certain suburbs.” The clear implication is that the word belongs to minority and immigrant populations. But it doesn’t: Wesh is everywhere, because its speakers are everywhere. France is the most diverse country in Europe, and our neighborhood (Paris’s 10th arrondissement) is the most diverse in France, home to people from more than 180 countries, 28% of whom are (like me) first-generation immigrants. Hearing certain words on a daily basis, words I know will never make it into the dictionnaire, I can see how the French response to wesh comes down to its complicated feelings about culture, class and race. 

Maybe there is a parallel between the way France won’t allow itself to appreciate the wesh richness the country has to offer and the way it sometimes undervalues the vital contributions millions of immigrants living here have made. Kind of like the way many cheered on the French national soccer team’s World Cup victory while downplaying the African origins of the majority of the team; or how French cuisine is constantly promoted abroad in the classic confit and cassoulet way, yet back home the number one dish preferred by the French themselves is (drum roll please)….couscous.

Wesh has been ushered into our house with myriad other words I never would have thought would work in France. There’s swag as in T’as le swag, Papa (You’ve got swag, Dad!) or thug, but Otto and Bibi pronounce it without the “th,” so it comes over as tug, as in tugboat, which of course makes me laugh. Then there’s bledard, which means nerd. Bledard comes from the West African term bled, meaning small town. Basically, if somebody’s a bledard in Paris, he has small-town tastes and doesn’t understand what’s cool.

What is cool is to say the word Staive (pronounced stah-ife) which takes the French expression “C’est ta vie” (that’s your life) and plays it at double speed. Staive is the equivalent of “whatever dude,” and it’s used systematically by one of our kids whenever the other announces he or she just received a good grade.

There’s also khey, which is a version of the Arabic word for brother. The kh normally should be pronounced like the j in Spanish, but since most French people have trouble with this, they start their kheys with an r, so it comes across as rhey. Rhey became standard usage for me last year when I stumbled on the French rapper Algerino’s hit song “Wesh Rhey.”

Sometimes my French-born wife Anais, who speaks French the way a concert pianist plays—tough words like serrurier (locksmith) or vétérinaire (veterinarian) rolling off her tongue like a Chopin nocturne—will squint and look to me to decode what the kids are saying. And it’s then that I realize I can be just as fluent as she is, maybe even better.

I arrived here with the hope of mastering classic French, only to walk away with a 21st-century version.

For her 12th birthday, Bibi hosted her first boum (pronounced boom but spelled with the letter u, and don’t ask why). Boums are starter parties for French adolescents and pre-adolescents, and yours truly was asked to DJ, which meant I was simply a chaperone who helped out if there was a technical difficulty, but I was not supposed to touch the music, ever. And it was during this party, me with the laptop trying to be invisible, watching all these sweaty mixed-up kids from the Tenth shouting out their bledards, tugs and rheys, that I realized my story with the French language had come full circle.

I arrived here with the hope of mastering classic French, only to walk away with a 21st-century version, one found on Snapchat, in schoolyard insults and rap lyrics; a French that’s part English, part African, part Arabic and fully French.

And thanks to all of this Staive weshness, I’ve fallen in love with the French language again. For me, this new French is the real French, the language I’ve always gravitated toward—probably because, as an immigrant, it’s the language I encounter most. (I also happen to understand it better than most of my French friends, which makes me ze cool dad.) Words like these have taught me what it truly means to master a language. It’s where the pride and love you have for your home comes through with an ease and dexterity and, wesh, a fluency that’s all your own.

—Mr. von Sothen is an American columnist living in Paris. This essay is adapted from his new book “Monsieur Mediocre: One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French” (Viking).