Contenu du sommaire : Le français en afrique noire, fait d'appropriation, sous la direction de Carole de Féral et Francis-Marie Gandon

French in Subsaharan Africa is the object of a double « appropriation » : as a linguistic system and as a vernacular means of communication. Because of the important part French plays in the socio-economical and socio-political organization of the francophone African states, it belongs to the actual or potential repertoire of every individual. Its use by multilingual speakers as a means of inter-group communication leads to structural changes influenced by the particular dominant indigenous language. As a result, a process of dialect formation is in progress, and « national Frenches » are developing which show a number of areal common characteristics determined by the modes of conceptualization and enunciation specific to Nergo-African culture.

Our purpose in this paper is to present Ivorian Empirical Standard French as the result of vernacularization of Academic French, via two interdependant sociolinguistic factors, by Ivory Coast speakers having at least a secondary school education. These factors are the semantic structures peculiar to orality and the presence of a Pre-Creole French, originally spoken only by the uneducated but now used by the younger generation as a typical Ivorian language.

French in the Southern provinces of French-speaking Cameroon is an object of « appropriation ». As a result one should expect to find structural changes. However these are less numerous if one compares the spoken varieties of French in Cameroon not to Standard French but to everyday metropolitan spoken French. A particularly original form of appropriation manifests itself in a vernacular variety used among students and called camfranglais because of the presence of English and Pidgin English lexical items within a French syntax.

« Slang as factor of linguistic variation and appropriation : the case of French in Burkina Faso ». The aim of this paper is to study the capacity of integration of slang into the common lexicon within an african context. The existence of a lexical continuum being here taken for granted along with the impossibility to strictly distinguish between registers, the following points will be examined : a) a typology of the formation processes of slang terms (« argotic » words) b) a diachronic approach of their use. Slang will eventually prove to be accelerate the creation of neologisms as linguistic grafts. Rather than a symptom of the insufficient knowledge of standard language, slang should be considered as a sign of its actual appropriation and of tis possible evolution towards a regional French.

This paper tries to describe French spoken by illetarates in Burkina Faso, through phonological and morpho-semantical interferences with local languages. « Popular French », thus analysed, appears as the result of a linguistic hybridation, and presents itself as an original modality of appropriation.

This paper tries to estimate syntactic distinctive features of written French in Burkinabe newspapers. The « language » thus described — at least its tendancies — appears as a combinative of conceptual undelying datas, looking, somehoww, like the classical stage of French. The use of French is the use of a new tool, not marked by historical characterizations.

In Central African Republic (CAR) several vernaculars spoken by different ethnic groups coexist. But one vehicular dialect, called Sängö, has spread mainly in cities and is now frequently used for daily communication. This dialect tends to compete more and more with French which is only used for official matters and is still the teaching language. Because of this contact-situation many cases of borrowings and code-switching can be observed. This mixing of languages, sometimes called « franc-sängo » », seems to be the most particule form of the appropriation of french in CAR.

«Appropriation of French in Black Africa : a discursive dynamics» French in Africa is an object of appropriation. After defining this concept, we examine the connections between functionality and vernacularity. In their own functional domains, speakers must negociate their legitimacy by showing that they master the externally defined norm. The diffuse self-appropriation inherent in urban plurilingualism remains virtually referred to its functional use and to the norm associated to it.