Lexical innovation among young speakers in the banlieues: social group, ethnicity, language and identity

It presents the rationale behind the construction of a new corpus of youth speech in French, and analyses the contribution of various sources and processes of innovation (borrowing, affixation, vernalisation, blending, rebracketing, composition, conversion, revitalisation, metaphor and metonymy) to the lexis of this speaker group.

The linguistic impact of innovative material on French is studied by an examination of successful and problematic cases of morphosyntactic integration of the innovative lexical material into the discourse, and it is suggested that spoken French is highly accommodating of innovation in the lexis on the whole. However, certain deviations from standard French morphosyntax are found to relate to use of non-standard lexical material, and it is argued that these problems of integration may be socially salient, used to mark the speaker's affiliation to particular identities, most significantly an affiliation with the multi-ethnic youth peer group. <br><br>Furthermore, the thesis examines, by quantitative as well as qualitative means, the connections between speakers' social backgrounds (their current regions of residence, their family's history of migration, their use of languages other than French, their national identity, their sex and their social network ties) and their use of lexical material produced by means of the various processes of innovation.