How ‘Oral’ Becomes ‘Social’: Eye Dialects in Riad Sattouf’s Comics

This article presents for the first time a quantitative and qualitative analysis of eye dialect in a large French comic corpus: sixteen comic books by Riad Sattouf ( Retour au collège , Pascal Brutal , La Vie secrète des jeunes , and Les Cahiers d’Esther ; 1133 pages) are studied to investigate the non-standard replacement of the letter <e> with an apostrophe (2134 occurrences). The absolute number of apostrophes per page in the corpus varies between zero and thirty, which highlights the importance of qualitative analyses of the single pages. Apostrophes for <e> rarely occur in contexts in which non-realization of schwa is systematic in standard French, as in final and medial syllables, but mainly in clitics (for example, ‘j’vais’ instead of <je vais>) and the first syllable of polysyllables (‘m’ssieur’ instead of <monsieur>). Non-realization in this context is socially neutral in the phonic medium but receives a negative social value when represented in the written medium. As well as pseudo-phonetic spellings (‘Kesskisspass’ for <qu’est-ce qui se passe>), apostrophes are particularly used to stigmatize racaille characters. Based on this analysis, the article presents a model of linguistic and non-linguistic construction of social identities in comics.