Les parlers jeunes dans l'Île-de-France multiculturelle éd. by Françoise Gadet (review)

The speech patterns of Parisian youth are often characterized in popular media as a nearly unrecognizable language that is apart from French. However, relatively little objective consideration has been given as to the actual linguistic properties of these parlers jeunes and to their relationship with the more accessible français populaire. The authors seek to bridge these gaps by presenting six studies drawing from the data of a relatively new spoken corpus: Multicultural Paris French (MPF). The first few chapters illustrate that many of the more salient and alienating attributes (e.g., secondary stress, a limited verb set, etc.) of les parlers jeunes are also present in—and indeed common to—other varieties and registers of spoken French, although the frequency or distribution of the features may vary. The final two chapters focus on the role of les parlers jeunes in the evolution of the language and on the ways Parisian youth identify themselves and others by their usage of terms such as rebeu, black, français, and so forth. The discussion on the differences between beur and rebeu is particularly in-teresting. Although one or two of the chapters come across as a little minimalistic in their analyses, the authors openly state as much and indicate the potential for greater depth in future study. This potential for future study is practically tangible throughout the work. In addition to providing convincing evidence for the legitimacy of these sociolects as members of the family of spoken French, the book serves as an open invitation to explore the untraditional, yet rich MPF corpus (much of which is accessible online in .wav and .TextGrid files). Because the corpus's informal, mostly unguided interviews were conducted by people who were already a part of the target community—young people with whom they already had an established relationship—the resulting speech is surprisingly natural and rich in qualities that are typically absent in more traditional corpora: questions from the interviewees, curse words, metalinguistic discussion, and candid discourse on identity and intergroup sentiments. As the goal of the edited work is to explore not a specific linguistic feature, but the speech of a specific group, the prosodic, phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical analyses are appropriately descriptive and are of great value to the linguistic researcher, especially those interested in les parlers jeunes. Additionally, the open discussion of ethnic identity and relations may also be of interest to those outside the field of linguistics. That said, researchers and graduate students of French will benefit most from this book, using it either as a window into the linguistic production and practices of the multicultural youth of Paris or as an introduction to the MPF corpus itself. Educators might also find a place for this work in a course on French linguistics (even at the undergraduate level), as it features relatively accessible work in multiple subfields of linguistics. Overall, the authors provide a refreshing and insightful view on the language use of an often overlooked, yet linguistically influential social group.