French slang

Is French slang as bad as the English slang? sometimes i cant work out if its a spelling error or just a slang word

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Permalink Reply by Wendy maray on May 24, 2012 at 1:57pm

For example:

I can't work out completely what this reads, i cannot find the words in the french dictionary

'il et juste mignion c tou! moi jai un mari avec manifik gosse et heureusse avec.c juste une conecence mousse! c tt et sil lafai sa avec toi c vraimen degueu de sa par mes pourkoi tu me di sa a moi!? tu malerre tres sinpa'

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on May 24, 2012 at 4:58pm

Apart from what George has said, an additional comment would be that you have two phenomena at work here-- use of the occasional word that might be regarded as "slang" ("dégueu", "gosse") but more significantly, the use of non-standard spelling as you suspect ("manifik" > "magnifique", "conecence" > "conaissance", "mes pourkoi" > "mais pourquoi", "tu malerre" > "tu m'as l'air") or 'texting' shortcuts ("c tt" > "c'est tout"). To a small extent, you also have non-standard syntax, in the sense that what you're getting is a written representation of a 'flow' of utterances that you might get in speech, but which written down aren't necessarily fully-formed sentences in all cases as you might expect in formal writing.

Writing your paragraph out in standard spelling...

"Il est juste mignon, c'est tout ! Moi, j'ai un mari, avec magnifique gosse et heureuse avec. C'est juste une connaissance ! C'est tout et s'il fait ça avec toi, c'est vraiment dégueu de sa part. Mais pourquoi tu me dis ça à moi ? Tu m'as l'air sympa."

you'll see that these are ostensibly 'normal' French words that you'll find in any dictionary. You're not dealing with what one might call carefully, articulately constructed sentences -- more a 'flow of emotion', but the vocabulary itself isn't slang as such.

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Permalink Reply by Wendy maray on May 24, 2012 at 6:02pm

Thank you, that was very helpful!

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EducatorPermalink Reply by George Hunt on May 24, 2012 at 2:00pm

yes it is pretty bad.

I am not sure what would be a good source to learn it from but from a search on

"examples of french slang" I came up with this from the BBC website.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/cool/

It seems interesting very well done to me (at a peek).

Here is the description

Want to show some street cred? Here is our essential guide to young French people's slang by Hakim M'Barek, presenter of our beginners' online course French Steps.