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Lisa Lim

Many have declared the highlights of the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics to have been Lady Gaga’s homage to cabaret and Céline Dion’s rendition of Edith Piaf’s “L’Hymne a l’amour”.
But for representing contemporary France, one segment stood out – Aya Nakamura’s performance on the Pont des Arts.
This is not just because Nakamura is the world’s most popular francophone performer and France’s top-selling artiste; her work has garnered 7 billion in streams, and she has been hailed as the nation’s biggest star since Piaf but with an even larger global reach.
Rather, it was a recognition of the evolution of French identity, culture and language.

Nakamura was born in the West African nation of Mali – which was under French colonial rule for 70 years until 1960 – but grew up on a housing estate in a banlieue of the northern part of the greater Paris region, Seine-Saint-Denis.
Built after the second world war, banlieues – although the term is officially socially neutral – have from the 1970s onwards been seen as economically deprived suburbs home to large immigrant populations. In this sense Nakamura represents the almost 50 per cent of France’s immigrant population who were born in Africa.


Nakamura’s music certainly shows multicultural influences, from zouk, French-Caribbean pop music from Martinique and Guadeloupe, to Afropop beats and elements of her Malian heritage. But it is her lyrics which linguists love – a mix of French, Arabic, English, West African languages like Bambara from Mali, and verlan.
Verlan is believed to have emerged in the non-European population of the Parisian suburbs. Derived initially in part from the argot – jargon or secret language – used in the Parisian criminal fraternity, and using coded words for controversial topics such as drugs and sex, to evade the authorities, verlan later grew to encompass a wider vocabulary.
The term verlan itself derives from French l’envers, meaning “the reverse” – the syllables “l’en” and “ver” are in reverse order, illustrating the main linguistic process applied. (Such processes have been used since the Middle Ages; Voltaire’s pseudonym is thought to have been a form of syllabic inversion, from Airvault, the writer’s original town.)

Verlan’s usage grew exponentially in particular in the 1980s and 1990s among second- and third-generation descendants of African migrants, and through African-French popular culture and music.
Some verlan words have entered the mainstream, including keuf, from French slang flic for police officer, and chelou from louche, meaning suspicious.
Nakamura’s opening ceremony performance included her number one hit song “Djadja”, which contains the lyric “le monde est tit-pe”, French for ‘the world is small’ – with “petit”, small, in verlan.
Urbanisation and migration led to verlan not only adapting French words, but also drawing on the languages of the diverse suburban population including Arabic, Romani, and English (oinj, for hashish cigarette, is from the English “joint”).
Verlan has come to stand for a multicultural, multilingual, marginalised community, and has allowed descendants of immigrants to construct positive hybrid identities.

Similar argots are found the world over; well-known English-based examples include Thieves’ Cant, used in England from the 16th to the 19th centuries, and the Cockney rhyming slang of London’s East End.
In China the syllabic script nushu, meaning “women’s writing”, was used by peasant women in Hunan province: it allowed subordinate, illiterate women in a male-dominated society to express themselves secretly through poetry, and to keep in contact with female relatives, offering them space and empowerment.
Empowerment was certainly on show when Nakamura made her grand entrance from the Institut de France, which houses the Académie Française. Founded in 1635, the Académie Française is France’s guardian of the French language, tasked with maintaining its purity and integrity.
The official authority on grammar, vocabulary and usage, it has been grappling with verlan’s increasing prominence – by excluding it from its volumes despite including other French slang.
Opening its hallowed doors to the performance by Nakamura – who was accompanied by no less than the Republican Guard band – is a symbolic and timely nod to migration, multiculturalism, and language evolution. As they might say in verlan – for c’est fou, “it’s crazy, great” – C’est ouf!


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Music

Aya Nakamura and her song using Parisian back slang symbolised today’s France at Olympics

French singer Aya Nakamura, who sang in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. Photo: AFP

French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura (centre, above) performs during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. A representative of contemporary France, she is notable for her lyrics that incorporate the back slang of the multicultural, multilingual Parisian suburbs. Photo: AFP/Pool

France’s top-selling artiste, Aya Nakamura represented the multicultural, multilingual face of the country in the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. Photo: AFP

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Celine Dion sings on the Eiffel Tower during the opening ceremony for the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Photo: Olympic Broadcasting Services via AP

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A statue of a Samsui woman in Singapore’s Chinatown. They wore a starched piece of cloth, usually red, folded into a square-shaped hat. Photo: Shutterstock

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Singer stood for contemporary France in Olympics opening ceremony with song whose lyrics are a multilingual mix including suburban slang


The back slang of suburban Paris, ‘verlan’ stands for a multicultural, multilingual, marginalised community. How appropriate that a singer whose lyrics embrace it featured in Olympics opening ceremony.


Paris 2024 Olympic Games

France

Chinese culture

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


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Language Matters

Language Matters | Aya Nakamura and her song using Parisian back slang symbolised today’s France at Olympics

Singer stood for contemporary France in Olympics opening ceremony with song whose lyrics are a multilingual mix including suburban slang