The diffusion of contemporary Arabic borrowings beyond the French banlieues

Contemporary Arabic borrowings in metropolitan French first emerged in the speech practices of speakers from multiethnic working-class urban neighborhoods (Billiez, 1992; Gadet, 2017), often referred to as banlieues or cités. While in these neighborhoods their use has been mainly associated with young male speakers of North African origin (e.g., Pooley & Mostefai-Hampshire, 2012), the increasing diffusion of Arabic borrowings beyond the banlieues raises questions such as: which forms are used, by whom, and where? Employing an online survey to address these questions, this study investigates the diffusion of contemporary Arabic borrowings in metropolitan French by assessing speakers’ familiarity with 38 Arabic forms. Based on 217 survey responses, the results show that there is great variation in the diffusion of individual forms. Moreover, while the use of Arabic borrowings is still largely an age-, class-, and ethnicity-related phenomenon in contemporary colloquial French, the data show clear diffusion of these forms to a wider variety of speakers in terms of their social and geographical characteristics, and challenges previous findings and assumptions regarding the gendered and urban nature of the phenomenon. Therefore, after crossing linguistic boundaries, contemporary Arabic borrowings also appear to have crossed social and geographical borders in contemporary France.