Socio-Verbal Function of the French Immigrant School Argot in the Film “Class” by L. Cantet

Abstract

The article analyzes speech characteristics of the characters of the film “Class” depicting French immigrants’ children. The teenagers study at one of the suburb Paris colleges. They communicate with each other and teachers in the form of a dialogue. The adolescents intentionally tend to ignore the rules of behavior established by the educational institution and neglect the norms of the codified French language. Using artistic images, the film reproduces one of the most topical social problems in modern France — that of immigrants’ resistance to accepting French cultural values, customs, codes, language, and speech culture.The characters’ speech determines their nationality, social status, personal values, and emotional state. Sampling, the linguistic and stylistic types of analysis were employed as research methods. The teenagers use verlanized and obscene lexical units, words from the young immigrant argot developed by borrowing, neologizing, and rethinking outdated French words. The verlan and special colloquial lexical units that characters use contain negative emotional and evaluative connotations. The insults, rudeness, name-calling, familiarity between immigrant children are ritual, intra-group, sociocultural, harmless, directed against the culture, language, economic dominance of the French-speaking ethnos in the society.The adolescent verbal behavior expresses a pejorative assessment of the French culture, language and people. The children ignore school rules and neglect standard French. Verlanisms, youth slang/argot, aggression are considered as the reaction of young immigrants to the requirement to learn standard French and behavioral rules of the French society, rejection by the ethnic French, lack of opportunities to rise in life, a sign of psychological trauma, as well as hardships.