r/French • u/12chihuahuasyapping • 1d ago
Generational language divide
Wondering if I am alone in this.
Working on improving my very stale reading fluency and making more of an effort in understanding spoken French as well as written french.
In that pursuit I've been watching French TV and have started to notice something.
When someone is over the age of 50, I can understand what they are saying without any problems, no issues there, but as soon as someone younger than 50 starts talking, I'm lucky to make out more than a few words even with context.
Am I alone here? Any tips for improving? It's partially the vocabulary and verlan, but it's also the contractions and speed of speech.
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u/Last_Butterfly 1d ago
I mean, teenagers and young adults are sometimes notorious for slang, but... 50 is a bit of an arbitrary limit, and bizarrely high to me. People in their 40s, or even 30s, don't speak much differently from those in their 50s or 60s most of the time, and people 50 and above also typically use many contractions, because those are ripe in the language as a whole, and not just a specific cultural phenomenon. Besides, diction is far from being solely linked to age ; news anchors, however old, are selected usually specifically for their clear speech, for example, whilst many a old geezer from the southern countryside where I used to spend summer vacations with my family were sometimes incomprehensible to me - and I am French !
Unless you're talking about a specific French that I know less about, I guess ?
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u/12chihuahuasyapping 1d ago
Yeah the 50 was just an arbitrary cutoffâI guess I was more so calling out that for a non-native speaker it very much feels like a whole different dialect when the contractions and verlan start coming at you at lightning speed versus when someone is speaking to maximize their innuciating.
I was referring specifically to the show Anthracite--specifically the Gen Z characters versus the Gen X characters. I'm sure this also gets at intentional artistic choices the show runners are making, but for whatever reason this show has made me think of it more from a generational perspective, but obviously the real world is much more nuanced.
Would love some recommendations for good shows to add to my listâmy auditory comprehension needs a lot of work and I am not much for peer-to-peer conversations (yet).
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u/maclawkidd 1d ago
It's slang, mixed with verlan, mixed with internet culture, sometimes english words pronounced in a french accent, sometimes arabic words, then they apply the verlan on the arabic word or slang, and so on...
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u/Renbarre 1d ago
And you should add speed. The younger generations spit out their words faster and faster. I sometimes wonder where this habit came from.
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u/GinofromUkraine 1d ago
It's not such a recent thing. My mother complained 30 years ago that she cannot follow US movies cause everyone talks so fast and everything happens so fast. I had no problems, being a young adult. One possible reason of speech getting faster could be video games where the speed of action/chatting/everything may be unbelievable, especially if you play them long enough.
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u/Renbarre 1d ago
It's definitely not new. I am a Jones generation and I started having problems with my nibblings when they reached teenhood. Suddenly they started speaking at such high speed it took me a long time to get used to it. My own father had to ask them to slow the flow of words because he couldn't follow at all.
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u/Agreeable_Ad1000 6h ago
As a QuĂ©bĂ©coise, I also noticed that I can understand older French people better than younger ones. Yes, the slang makes it hard, but I feel like younger generations have their own accent? All the âtâ become âtchâ which makes the language less articulate and clear for the ear.
The closer the language is to neutral French, the easier it is to understand, but now the language is kind of moving away from neutral French.
Anyway, I already know many French people will tell me I canât say French is not articulate enough in France because I am Quebecoise and that we might be using the least articulate form of Frenchđ I KNOW. Accents are not a bad thing and language is always evolving!!
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u/webbitor B2 maybe? đșđž 1d ago
I learned most of my French almost 30 years ago as a teen. Now I find have some trouble understanding adults, because I learned teen-speak, and they use more varied and sophisticated language. But I have even more difficulty with young people, because a lot of changes in slang have happened in those decades. There's even arab words that have been adopted that are totally alien to me.
I imagine it's like hearing English-speaking kids using giving x, send it, mid, cap, fire, yeet, etc.